Procedures that decide things, increasingly without being asked.
Drukqs is a double album released in 2001 by Aphex Twin. It contains tracks dating back seven or eight years, though most were relatively new. James rushed its release after accidentally leaving an MP3 player with new tracks on a plane, aiming to preempt an internet leak.
Geoffrey Hinton and colleagues established core methods—backpropagation for representation learning, and Boltzmann machines for unsupervised deep generative modelling—between 1985 and 1995. Their work was grounded in statistical mechanics, experimentally verified on small-scale networks, and explicitly recognised as foundational for machine learning with artificial neural networks. It did not deliver production AI, nor claim to.
Bubble Shooter is a 2002 puzzle game by Absolutist, later expanded by Ilyon Dynamics. It asks players to clear marbles by matching three or more of the same colour before they reach the bottom line. It has four difficulty levels and two scoring modes: Classic (no limits) and Sniper (fewest shots wins).
The Witness is a first-person puzzle game developed and published by Thekla, Inc., released in 2016 on Windows and PlayStation 4. It is an open-world island filled with natural and human-made structures, where players solve over 650 puzzles by drawing paths on grids or across environments.
Bejeweled is a browser-based match-three puzzle game developed by PopCap Games and first released in 2000. Players swap adjacent gems to form lines of three or more identical gems, clearing them and triggering cascading falls. Swaps that fail to produce a match revert automatically. It features untimed and timed modes — the former ending when no moves remain, the latter requiring point accumulation to stall a depleting timer — and later introduced competitive multiplayer with special gems.
Borderlands (2009) is a role-playing shooter developed by Gearbox Software. It combines first-person shooter action with RPG systems—including four distinct Vault Hunters, branching skill trees, mission-driven progression, and a procedural loot engine generating over 15 million weapon and gear variations. Its cell-shaded-like art style gives Pandora a comic-book appearance. Players fight hostile wildlife and human forces on the fictional planet while seeking a fabled Vault.
Candy Crush Saga is a match-three puzzle game where players swap adjacent candies to make lines or columns of three or more identical colours. Matches remove candies, trigger cascading falls, and generate points — with bigger matches producing special candies that clear larger board sections. Each level imposes a specific goal — like collecting a number of candies or clearing jelly-covered tiles — within a fixed move limit. Lives are lost on failure and regenerate over time or via purchase. The game introduced saga-based progression and cross-platform sync, with mobile versions built for touch and offline play.
Boulder Dash is a deterministic puzzle game built on gravity, grids, and consequence. It gives you Rockford, dirt, boulders, time, and diamonds—and nothing else. Its rigour is its reward.
Monster Rancher is a PlayStation life simulation RPG by Tecmo (1997) where players acquire, raise, combine, and battle monsters — with CD-based generation as its defining input method.
Crypt of the NecroDancer is a rhythm-gated roguelike released in April 2015 by Brace Yourself Games. All movement and attacks must occur on the musical beat. Enemies follow fixed rhythmic patterns — some on every beat, others on subdivisions. Missing the beat resets scoring and risks damage. The dungeon has four zones, each with four levels. Input supports dance pad, keyboard, or gamepad.
Google DeepMind is a research lab, not a business. Its value lies in its ability to produce peer-recognised scientific milestones — not revenue, not IP licensing, not product deployment. It proves that one company can fund high-risk, long-horizon AI research at industrial scale — but only by insulating it entirely from market logic.
Google is a search engine company founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Its core technology, PageRank, ranked websites by inbound links — a method co-published with Motwani and Winograd and patented by Stanford. Scott Hassan wrote the first implementation. The company launched from Susan Wojcicki’s garage. Its name misspelled 'googol' to signal scale. Initial funding came from Andy Bechtolsheim’s $100,000 cheque in August 1998. The sources say nothing about advertising, revenue, users, infrastructure costs, or market position beyond this.
Baidu is a foundational case of algorithm-first platform building: its 1996 RankDex technology became its 2000 product, its 2001 ad model predated Google’s, and its 2003 content-search innovations were tailored to Chinese media structures. It achieved national dominance and NASDAQ listing — but never decoupled from search advertising, even as it invested in Apollo, Xiaodu, and AI stacks.
Netflix is a case study in operational iteration — not technological invention. Its value lies in how it structured incentives, removed friction, and scaled infrastructure — not in what it claimed to be.
Spotify is a Swedish music streaming service founded in April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It operates under a freemium model, offering DRM-protected audio content—including over 100 million songs and 7 million podcasts—from record labels and media companies. Royalties are distributed based on stream share rather than fixed per-unit payments, with ~70% of revenue going to rights holders. It became publicly traded on the NYSE in April 2018 and reported its first profitable year in fiscal 2024. As of March 2026, it served over 777 million monthly active users and 300 million paying subscribers.
Codd’s 1969 relational model is a formal specification—not software, not SQL, not a product. It defines data as tuples in relations, enforces consistency via logic, and insists all information be explicit. Real databases violate it daily. That gap is where data engineering begins.
The AMS RMX16 is a UAD-only reverb plug-in. It requires UA hardware. It costs $349. It arrived in UA Software 1.7. It gives one sound — nothing more.
The EMT 250 was the first digital reverberation device to create ambience through a purely electronic system. The Universal Audio plug-in models that hardware exactly — including its single reverb program, five additional effects (Delay, Phasing, Chorus, Echo, Space), lever-driven interface and all its limitations: non-linear-phase anti-aliasing filters, system latency, input clipping and limited frequency response. It uses the exact same algorithm as the original, captured from Allen Sides’ unit and re-engineered by Dr. Barry Blesser.
The Eventide H9 Harmonizer is a pedal-format multi-effects unit built to consolidate four Eventide Factor-series stompboxes into one device.
The Universal Audio Lexicon 224 Digital Reverb is a UAD plug-in that models the 1978 hardware unit using its exact algorithms, firmware version 4.4, input transformers, and 12-bit AD/DA gain stepping converters. It exposes all eight reverb programs and every tunable parameter as dedicated fader-style controls. It adds Input/Output gain, Pitch Shift, and a selectable Bug Fix mode. It belongs to the UAD Plug-In series and is categorised as a software algorithmic reverb.
The Eventide SP2016 Reverb plug-in is a faithful software recreation of the 1982 hardware unit. It gives users six algorithmic reverbs — Room, Stereo Room, and Hi-Density Plate, each in Vintage and Modern variants — with authentic early reflections, evolving echo density, and smooth decay. It prioritises immediacy and character over flexibility or physical accuracy.
A professional-grade digital effects processor with dual independent effects blocks, nearly 100 algorithms—including 11 reverbs—and 24-bit/96kHz conversion. Supports true stereo reverb I/O and extensive looping (up to 20 seconds per block). Firmware updates require Compact Flash and strict version dependencies; bootloader corruption requires factory reprogramming.
Mutable Instruments Marbles is a Eurorack module for generative timing and control voltage. It uses hardware randomness, memory-based reuse (DEJA VU), and adaptive quantization (STEPS) to produce rhythm and pitch that respond to player input. It has no audio output, no presets, no MIDI, and no visual interface beyond LEDs. Its strength is in linking decision-making across domains—timing, pitch, and memory—in real time.
The Eventide Space is a reverb-and-delay pedal offering 12 algorithmic spatial effects—including Hall, Plate, Blackhole®, and Shimmer—controlled via 10 knobs, MIDI, expression pedal, or HotSwitch. It features 100 presets (some artist-designed), true analog bypass, tap tempo/MIDI clock sync, and mono/stereo I/O in a rugged metal pedal format. Software tools FactorLib and H9 Control manage presets; the SpaceTime algorithm combines modulation, two delays, and reverb.
