[1] Created by Ruse Laboratories, the initial auction featured seven lots and was held at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum on March 27, 2015.
C program by its creator Brian Kernighan on dot-matrix printer paper, a printed copy of 5,000 lines of Assembly code comprising the earliest known version of Turtle Graphics, signed by its creator Hal Abelson, a necktie containing the six-line qrpff algorithm capable of decrypting content on a commercially produced DVD video disc, and a pair of drawings representing OkCupid's original Compatibility Calculation algorithm, signed by the company founders.
[4] Two other lots were “living algorithms,” including a set of JavaScript tools for building applications that are accessible to the visually impaired and the other is for a program that converts lines of software code into music.
[5] Winning bidders received, along with artifacts related to the algorithms, a full intellectual property license to use, modify, or open-source the code.
[8] Sebastian Chan, Director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Cooper–Hewitt,[9] attended the event remotely from Milan, Italy via a Beam Pro telepresence robot.