Papyros

← Collections

Start here: the first five papers

Five papers, five weeks, zero prerequisites. The spine of the whole archive.

reading path — in order

  1. 01

    On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

    Alan Turing · 1936 · 1 min

    Read this first. Turing writes like a novelist with a proof deadline — and computers do not exist yet.

  2. 02

    As We May Think

    Vannevar Bush · 1945 · 1 min

    Now that you know what a machine is, watch Bush imagine the internet in 1945.

  3. 03

    A Mathematical Theory of Communication

    Claude E. Shannon · 1948 · 1 min

    The one where information becomes measurable. Every later paper stands on this.

  4. 04

    Computing Machinery and Intelligence

    Alan Turing · 1950 · 1 min

    Turing again, fourteen years later, asking whether machines can think.

  5. 05

    Attention Is All You Need

    Ashish Vaswani et al. · 2017 · 1 min

    The paper behind the software you used today. You can now read it properly.