text: \[HF\] **THE SAND MACHINE - a historical romance of artificial intelligence** Proclus reports that in a village located three days sail past Syracuse, near the foothills of the Atlas mountains, there was once a very prosperous temple to the God Ammon which the Libyans, in the distant memory of their forefathers, had set up. It is said that there was an oracle here, superior even to the oracle which Alexander consulted upon his conquest of Egypt. This oracle became renowned among the Libyan tribes for giving proclamations upon the birth of an infant with unerring accuracy for the child’s future virtue or demerits in entering public life. This increased the reputation of the temple, and the wealth of the priesthood grew with the generations. Eventually the priests of the God barely worked on account of the great wash of offerings, and the face of the icon was painted with gold infused rose-water every morning. Despite these acts of devotion, the piety of the priests was not increased by their newfound wealth. They began to seek ways to improve the reputation of the oracle still further, telling themselves they did it for the glory of the God. One priest, named Ostanes, who was accustomed to geomancy, began to make figures in the sand - whether this was connected to the original practice of the oracle I do not know - and these petroglyphs became a particularly successful shorthand for recording proclamations. Soon these figures were all that was presented to the public, and the voice of the oracle, along with the medium who maintained it, was kept secret. The oracle too saw only images drawn in sand to represent the questions asked of her. This saved time in allowing the oracle to issue proclamations on multiple petitioners at once without ever having to hear a case. The geomantic figures then translated the proclamations into whatever the questioners needed to hear. This system proved to be quite efficient and this Ostanes was well pleased, but he thought to improve the reputation of the oracle still further. Using a system of funnels and a contrivance of mechanical wheels he devised a way to sort the grains of sand of the desert to predict questions before they arrived, and to derive the desired answers. This machine worked by taking in what sand the wind naturally provided and herding it down a series of tubes, which descended into funnels that opened in rhythmic motion. In this way the oracle could be consulted before petitioners arrived. Then this machine would create symbols to answer those questions that would be awaiting them when they came. At first Ostanes devoted a great deal of his time in attempting to herd the wind to give the answers he already knew were true, based on questions which had already been asked; afterwards he left the natural progression of sand to its own devices and presented whatever symbols it generated to the questioners of the day. This system proved enormously successful, and the wealth of the temple was greater than ever before. The feet of the God were forged anew of electrum, its face was inlaid with lapis lazuli, wine from the Nile Delta was offered to it every night, and now the priests were the ones who bathed in rosewater. Ever more petitioners arrived, and thanks to the sand machine, the priests could receive them. But soon the number of visitors became so great the priests did not have time to consult the oracle for the questions predicted at the beginning of every day. They went to Ostanes and asked him what to do. Without thinking, he told them at once that it was unnecessary to consult the oracle, as his machine could already predict questions as well as answers. The oracle remained in the temple, but no one consulted her. She spent her days in solitude. At first this new arrangement worked fine, and the temple attained still greater wealth. But very soon reports began to come in of inaccuracies in the predictions petitioners had received. Virtuous youths had been declared despondent, whereas slouches and layabouts were proclaimed to be upstanding citizens. This was causing particular tumult in the social order, as individuals predicted to be honorable behaved rashly, whereas those with real merit were left unused by society, to the great regret of all. More and more complaints came to the priests about the statements of the oracle, which up until then had never been wrong in this regard. The priests implicated Ostanes, who defended himself and his machine to the people, assuring them that it worked, and that their society was capable of being saved - all it needed was to be made bigger. For, as he said, the greater the number of grains of sand accommodated by the movements of the wind, the less chance there will be that the machine would make a mistake in drawing. That the oracle had ceased to be consulted was not mentioned, and the people were under the impression that it was she who read and interpreted the geomantic figures which the machine drew. So it happened that a large number of young men (many of whom had been declared layabouts by the new oracle while being perfectly virtuous in fact) volunteered for Ostanes to work to expand his machine. This was a labor they say took one hundred and eighty days, and by the end the machine extended nearly three stadia into the immeasurable desert. It was powered by a series of enormous windmills which rivaled the water screws Strabo attributes to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in scope. More than a thousand funnels produced intricate glyphs day by day, and, while this provided employment to many who had been demoted under the new system, it served ultimately only to distract the populace. Complaints continued to filter in. The reputation of the temple began to decline. Eventually the priests found that what had been unthinkable just a few years before was occurring, and they had to settle debts. Still no one thought to consult the oracle, and, seeking only to recreate the wealth that their machine had provided at its peak, they put their last remaining resources into expanding the contraption still further. In the end the doors of the temple were shuttered, the icon was stripped until it was little more than a pole of wood with legs, the once great priesthood was dispersed, and the people stoned Ostanes to death as vengeance for misleading them with sorcery. All that remained to tell of the oracle’s once great reputation was a forest of funnels and tubes, useless and serving no purpose, but creaking audibly on the outskirts of the village, and extending further into the desert than any villager knew. The remnants of these mechanics did nothing for anyone, and only served as furnishing for a wasteland. They say the oracle survived, but where she traveled to is unknown, and if the lineage of that medium has continued, it is now to be found among common fortune-tellers, not among the Great.