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SQL Server 2025, an RTX 5090, and the slow death of “Will the hon. Gentleman give way?”
Two Graphics Cards and 1.7 Million Speeches to Prove a Negative
The question
Do MPs ever change each other’s minds?
Not “do they vote differently” — the whips settle that. I mean something narrower and more interesting: does an argument made from the opposition benches ever end up coming out of a minister’s mouth? Somebody stands up in 1987, says a thing nobody has said before, and four years later the government is saying it back. That happens, surely. Parliament would be a very expensive piece of theatre if it never happened.
I had 1.7 million speeches, a database that can do vector search, and two graphics cards sitting in a machine under my desk doing nothing. It seemed like a fair question to put to them.
The answer, for about a month, was no.
I want to be clear that I did not want the answer to be no. I wanted a lovely little chart with a bump in it. What I got was two independent methods, built weeks apart on entirely different principles, both saying no, for entirely different reasons. Which is — and I have had to talk myself round to this — a much better result than a bump would have been. One method saying yes…
