The Convergence

Robert Eberhard
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The Code of the Court. A pre-release copy of a book on growing the sport of squash.

  1. Episode 1

    Introduction - Two Long Games

    Squash and artificial intelligence share an unlikely origin story, both born in England in the 1830s, both slow to reveal their full potential, and both arriving at 2022 at opposite ends of their respective arcs. The introduction traces squash's remarkable two-century journey from a school corridor in Harrow to a genuinely global sport, one that produces world champions on every continent and has finally earned its place at the 2028 Olympics, while quietly losing courts, participants, and cultural relevance in the decades it spent ignoring every major technological wave. In parallel, it traces AI's seventy-year path from a mathematician's dream to a technology that one hundred million people adopted in two months. The argument is simple: for the first time in history, the tools exist to do what no governing body or marketing campaign ever could for squash, and this book is the story of how both long games finally converge.

  2. Episode 2

    Chapter 1 - The Wall and the Engine

    Two ideas were born in the same country, in the same decade, within twenty miles of each other. In the 1830s, Harrow School students improvising in a basement corridor accidentally invented squash — a game whose shared wall made intelligence, not power, the minimum requirement for survival. A few miles south, Charles Babbage was designing the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine that imagined the processor, the memory, and the program a century before any of them existed. Ada Lovelace, his collaborator, asked the question that would haunt AI research for the next hundred and fifty years: can a machine originate anything, or can it only do what it is told? Both ideas were genuinely significant, both were ahead of their time, and neither had yet found the world it needed.

  3. Episode 3

    Chapter 2 - Across the Atlantic

    When squash crossed the Atlantic in 1884, it did not democratize — it deepened its class associations, arriving at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and spreading through Ivy League clubs, university athletic programs, and the social networks of American privilege. America did not open squash to everyone; it gave squash a more thoroughly elite home than it had ever had in England. Simultaneously, Herman Hollerith crossed a different kind of Atlantic, applying Babbage's punch card concept to the 1890 United States Census and demonstrating that mechanical information processing was practically superior to human labor — a commercial motivation that pure mathematics had never provided. The company Hollerith founded would eventually become IBM. Both ideas had crossed the ocean. Both had found institutional homes that would shape their trajectories for decades.

  4. Episode 4

    Chapter 3 - The Golden Era

    The summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College gave artificial intelligence its name and its founding ambition: that every aspect of human intelligence could be precisely described and mechanically reproduced. The optimism was genuine and, within its own frame of reference, earned — the Logic Theorist was proving mathematical theorems, and ELIZA was conducting conversations that made intelligent adults feel genuinely heard. Simultaneously, Kenneth Cooper's 1968 aerobics research found squash earning the highest cardiovascular scores of any sport, and the professional class flooded into courts across North America with champions like Barrington and Hunt giving the sport its human face. Both communities were performing brilliantly within bounded domains and beginning, without quite knowing it, to encounter the costs of those boundaries.

  5. Episode 5

    Chapter 4 - The Promise and the Rule Book

    Both squash and artificial intelligence built their institutional infrastructures in the same era and embedded within them the same hidden flaw: institutions designed by and for the people who had created the field, optimizing for the experience those people understood and leaving everything else as an afterthought. Squash wrote its rule book through the International Squash Rackets Federation, eventually resolving the hardball-softball divide but creating a governing class whose instinct was conservation rather than adaptation. AI wrote its epistemological rule book through the physical symbol system hypothesis — the declaration that intelligence was fundamentally symbol manipulation — which was productive within its domain and quietly inadequate outside it. Jahangir Khan arrived and built his 555-match winning streak, demonstrating what the game could ask of a human being; Jansher Khan extended the Pakistani dynasty through eight World Open titles; and the sport's institutions managed the tension between who ran the sport and who was best at it without resolving it.

  6. Episode 6

    Chapter 5 - Peak Squash, Peak Optimism

    The Kodak story is the frame for this chapter: Steven Sasson invented digital photography inside Kodak in 1975 and watched his invention shelved while Kodak optimized for film, eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2012. Both squash and AI in the 1980s were Kodak — well-managed, optimized for what they had built, carrying the particular blindness that comes from genuine success. Squash's courts were full, its professional tour was gaining visibility through glass-backed courts, and Jansher Khan was demonstrating tactical intelligence that matched Jahangir's physical dominance. Then Jonathan Power became the first North American world number one in 1999, arriving from outside the institutional pipelines and revealing, through the sport's inability to process or capitalize on his cultural distinctiveness, that squash's institutions were optimized for the players they had always produced and had no mechanism for converting their most interesting moment into new participants. AI's second winter collapsed the expert systems boom for the same structural reason — the technology worked within its domain and failed to close the last mile outside it.

  7. Episode 7

    Chapter 6 - When the Courts Go Quiet

    Decline rarely announces itself, and Squash's decline was precisely the kind that arrives dressed as stability — membership numbers slightly down but surely recovering, courts quieter at shoulder hours but still full on Saturday mornings. The economic conditions of the late 1980s, rising interest rates and softening real estate values, made the squash court a difficult asset to justify, and the one-way ratchet of court closures began to turn — once closed, courts were rarely replaced. The sport's governing bodies responded by presenting participation data in the most favourable possible light, relying on historical numbers rather than current surveys, breaking the feedback loop that would have allowed the leadership to see the problem clearly. Egypt went in the opposite direction, building a squash culture of extraordinary depth that would eventually produce multiple generations of world champions, proving that the sport's decline in Western markets was not inevitable but the product of specific institutional failures.

  8. Episode 8

    Chapter 7 - The AI Winters

    The AI winters were not interruptions in the story of artificial intelligence — they were the periods during which the most important work in the field's history was being done by people the mainstream had stopped paying attention to. Herbert Simon's 1957 prediction that computers would be world chess champions within a decade was the epitome of the field's founding optimism; the Lighthill Report of 1973 was the first honest reckoning with the gap between promise and reality, and British funding was substantially cut. Geoffrey Hinton, working with Rumelhart and Williams, published the backpropagation paper in 1986, lifting the theoretical ceiling on neural networks without having the data or hardware to demonstrate what lifting that ceiling meant. Yann LeCun was teaching neural networks to read handwritten digits at Bell Laboratories with accuracy that exceeded rule-based approaches on a real commercial task, and NVIDIA was founded in 1993 to make graphics cards for video games, inadvertently building the hardware infrastructure that would eventually make large-scale neural network training possible.

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The Code of the Court. A pre-release copy of a book on growing the sport of squash.

Information

  • Creator
    Robert Eberhard
  • Episodes
    23
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Robert Eberhard