In the wake of the school exam results fiasco, the prime minister told a roomful of schoolchildren: “I am afraid your grades were almost derailed by a mutant algorithm.” This sounds like a peculiarly unexciting 1950s sci-fi B-movie in which an evil artificial intelligence busies itself exclusively with causing chaos in teenage education, but where exactly does “mutant” come from?
Originally from “mutare” the Latin verb “to change”, it arrived in English at the turn of the 20th century via the Dutch evolutionary biologist Hugo de Vries, and his book translated as “The Mutation Theory”. On this theory, new species formed not gradually (on the classical Darwinian view) but suddenly, through the spontaneous appearance of “mutants” with entirely different characteristics.
Algorithms do not breed, of course, but they could potentially mutate due to copying errors. In this case, though, the exam-marking “algorithm” (or mathematical procedure) was not some supercomputer deep-learning system gone rogue, or even a list of sums copied down wrong: it was a policy designed by humans, for which the prime minister wished to take no responsibility. Coincidentally, perhaps, US English offers a pertinent sense of “mutant” that means “someone regarded as having antisocial or sociopathic tendencies”.
• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.
