In his 1889 treatise “The Gospel of Wealth,” Andrew Carnegie wrote, “Without wealth, there can be no Maecenas,” referring to the patron of ancient Roman poetry. A few weeks ago, the two founders of Ruse Laboratories, a new company that hopes to get people to regard computer code as art, arrived in the great hall of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, which is housed in Carnegie’s mansion on East Ninety-first Street. They were there to discuss plans for their Algorithm Auction, the first art auction of computer code, to be held at the museum on March 27th.

The founders, Benjamin Gleitzman and Fernando Cwilich Gil, had lost their luggage in transit from California. Their carry-ons held a gourd for drinking maté and a dot-matrix printer for printing out code, but no clothes, so they were still wearing their outfits from the day before. Gleitzman, who is twenty-eight, was an early employee at Hunch, an algorithm-based company that was acquired by eBay for eighty million dollars, in 2011. He had on black Lululemon yoga pants. (He had been doing Hatha poses during a layover at the Denver airport.) Cwilich Gil, thirty-eight, has a goatee and wore a warmup jacket advertising Argentina’s national soccer team.

The Algorithm Auction is intended to underscore the aesthetics of computer code and, by extension, to attract more diverse people to programming. The pair also want to introduce patronage to the tech world, upsetting the venture-capital model, with its emphasis on profits, in favor of the kind of philanthropy that Andrew Carnegie championed.

Cwilich Gil and Gleitzman were accompanied by Rich Jones, a self-described “cypherpunk and hacker” based in Berkeley, who had written a virus to be displayed at the auction. Jones wore a red Delta Air Lines blanket around his neck like a scarf. Cara McCarty, the Cooper Hewitt’s curatorial director, arrived in the great hall. “Good to see you,” she said to the group.

They all huddled around a vitrine next to a stone fireplace. Setting his laptop on the exhibition case, Gleitzman said, “Let me open this up so I can show you the size of things.” He explained the first lot in the auction, “OkCupid Compatibility Calculation,” a pencil-and-ink drawing of the matchmaking company’s algorithm:

“It’s essentially the equation that will describe if you and a potential partner are compatible,” Gleitzman said. “I think it will be the biggest one.”

“Sixteen by twenty-four,” McCarty said, scribbling notes.

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The next lot was “qrpff,” a framed necktie imprinted with the code for a computer program that was written by two M.I.T. graduates in 2001 to crack Hollywood’s secret DVD-scrambling method. “It’s very short, only six to seven lines of code, and it’s printed on neckties and business cards to make the point ‘Why is something that’s only this big illegal?’ ”

The other lots in the auction include “Turtle Geometry,” a printout of the foundational algorithm that President Obama used last December, when he became the first President to write a line of code; “Hello World,” a handwritten copy of the algorithm, devised in 1978, that is the first thing every computer-science student learns; and “Progression: Triptych,” the license for a three-part algorithm, designed by a programmer with Stargardt disease, to help the blind navigate computer screens.

The auction’s guest list includes Wendi Deng and Larry Gagosian. The winning bidder for each lot will take home two black 3D-printed sandstone slabs, about the size of bagels, inscribed with Babylonian Akkadian cuneiform describing the algorithm he or she has purchased. When lined up side by side, the slabs will provide the owner with a password to download the code from an online repository. “It’s like the Leonardo Codex,” McCarty said.

“It’s a little showmanship, of course,” Cwilich Gil said. “You need that.”

The slabs are a nod to the Plimpton 322 tablet, a Babylonian artifact from around 1800 B.C.E., which is in Columbia University’s George Arthur Plimpton collection.

“This is a prototype,” Gleitzman said, passing a 3D-printed tablet to McCarty. “We’ll have a copy of the Plimpton at the auction.” He talked about Babylonian tablets. “The originals—the Plimpton, et cetera—they all describe a procedure like how to find a square root, how to find the area of a field after the Nile floods. I’ve always heard the last line translated as—”

“ ‘This is the process’!” McCarty interrupted, finishing his sentence.

“Yes, ‘This is the procedure,’ ” Gleitzman continued. “But our Akkadian specialist said that what it’s actually saying is ‘So sayeth the deity’ or ‘God said.’ ”

“Is that on a lot of the tablets?” McCarty asked.

“It’s on every tablet,” Gleitzman said. “I love that for the Babylonians there was no separation between the religious aspect and the pure underlying ideas of the codes of the universe.”

Gleitzman closed his laptop, and McCarty returned to her office. The Ruse team wandered into Carnegie’s study, where the ceiling moldings are frescoed with maxims. Gleitzman stared up. “ ‘As one lamp lights another, nor grows less, so nobleness enkindleth nobleness,’ ” he read aloud. “Wow! ‘As one lamp lights another, as one lamp lights another.’ It’s like, I give someone something, but I lose nothing.”

“It’s free software,” Jones, the hacker, said. “It’s fucking free software.” ♦