by Alan B. Scrivener
(c) 1997
word count 4528 Last update 14-Feb-1999
"Where's Shep?" asked Santos as he took a seat in the crowded pub. Just like the last three people who came in.
"Nobody knows," answered Brook from behind the bar.
The crowd wasn't that big, really, only a dozen now if you counted me and the bartender, but the cozy adobe building wasn't very big either, and there were only so many of the "good chairs."
Hector waved the Spaniard over. "Hey, Gorditas, I want introduce you to some people."
Santos made his way over to where Hector and two others sat around table made of a wooden wire spool, sharing some peanuts and a pitcher of beer. He saw Hector's freckled and wrinkled arm emerged from the sleeve of his Hawaiian shirt into a cone of brightness as it reached under a hanging lamp to shake his hand. The arm gestured, "Santos Gorditas, this is Doctor Fritz Pfeffer. Did I say that right?"
The man to his right in a rumpled dusty black suit nodded and humpfed.
Between the was a fellow in a plaid shirt and blue jeans, with a halo of hair in what used to be called an "Afro," who piped up, "And I'm Mo Benson, grad student," and grabbed Santo's hand to shake it.
"I met these two at New Mexico State, in a workshop on finite element methods," Hector explained. "I convinced them to drive up from Albuquerque tonight. I told them they'd get to meet some folks who run their models on supercomputers. The guys in the physics department at state have to timeshare a VAX."
"I'm very sorry to hear that," said Santos. "VMS?"
"No, at least it's Ultrix," volunteered Mo.
"So what do you model?" asked Santos as he pulled up a chair.
Meanwhile, the phone at the bar rang, and Brook picked it up and engaged in a short conversation. After he hung up, he waited for Dr. Pfeffer and Mo to quit arguing over how a finite element grid was constructed on their computer before he cleared his throat. "Excuse me folks, but our guest of honor isn't going to make it tonight. Shep is stuck up at his place with a busted truck, and hasn't been able to fix it in time."
"Does he need a ride?" I offered. I knew the way to Shep's place, which was not too far, really, on the southeastern outskirts of Santa Fe; but it was mostly a slow, rough ride over a rocky gravel road.
"I asked him the same thing," Brook responded, "but he says he wants to keep workin' on it before the coffee wears off."
A murmur had started up in our small crowd, and the murmur grew as it became clear that our Tuesday night tradition was being interrupted. We'd all come to El Ciervo Blanco for the same reason, to hear Shep tell "scientific tall tales." They were never provably false, but never plausibly true. It was an oral art form, so to speak.
"So, we drove all the way up here for nothing?" asked Mo.
"Well, wait a blinkin' minute," popped up Bingo, our Australian quantum chemist and ukulele prodigy, from the end of the bar. "We're all intelligent, articulate, technically- minded folk, aren't we? Can't we entertain ourselves?"
"Yeah," agreed Hector, "there's some folks over here I haven't even met yet." He waved his hand toward a tired-looking sunburned man in construction clothes and a perky blonde woman in a smart Navy blue dress. Maybe they're intelligent, technigent, and articulent too." He heard a laugh from the other direction and glanced left. "well, even more folks I don't know!" An Air Force Leutenant, in uniform, sat next to a dark-haired, dark-eyed young man in a sport coat and slacks.
At this last remark, the young man in the sport coat shot back, "Hey, Hector, don't you remember me? Desi D'Angelo, Sandia Labs, I met you at the first CRADA conference. You were having that negative zero underflow problem in your finite difference solver, and I told you to try it without the floating point chip. Did that work?"
Hector coughed, "Right, Desi, of course I know you, I didn't see you in the shadow there," Hector's voice dropped to a whisper, "but ix-nay on the solver- say, fella, that's a sensitive application."
"Whatever. You gave me reprint about it. But anyway, enough pleasant banter, this is my friend Leutenant Avery Soma, with the Air Force Weapons Lab at Patrick. He has got the gnarliest computer floor in Albuquerque."
"Oh, really?" questioned Mo.
Big Jack Groves, the rancher and Santa Fe cop, pointed to the sunburned laborer sitting in front of him. "This here's my friend, Stan Boyer. He's a solar energy researcher --"
"That's just my hobby," Stan insisted.
"-- and a commercial building contractor here in Santa Fe. He does wonders with passive cooling and heating and thick insulation."
"Just copying the Pueblo Indians," Stan shrugged.
"And how about you, little lady?" Bingo asked of the one remaining stranger.
"Hi, I'm Nancy Phoebus, and I'm five nine, mister," the lady replied in Bingo's direction, and then to the group she said, "I teach science and math at Los Alamos Middle School and work part time at Via Con Diodes bookstore."
"So, who brought you to this little pub?" Bingo quizzed.
"Actually, I read about it on the Internet. Well, an e-mail list, actually, for Rio Grande SIGGRAPH, posted by an SE for Celestial."
"Whoa there, slow down a minute," complained Stan. "I know what e-mail is, but what's a sigruff? What's an SE?"
"I'm sorry," said Nancy, and shifted into junior high school teacher mode. "The ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery. They have Special Interest Groups, or SIGs. The SIGGRAPH is the ACM SIG on computer graphics. They have local chapters around the world, and the Rio Grande chapter is very active in New Mexico, what with the labs and all the computer science here." She looked pleased with herself. "Uh, what was the other question?"
"He wants to know what an SE is. It's a sleazy weasel if you ask me." Hector was waving his fist around. "He had no right to post about our night, in our bar."
Nancy looked dismayed. Bingo came to her defense. "Hey, never you mind him, you're absolutely welcome here tonight or any night."
"And that SE fella has a right to free speech, too," Brook added, "even if it is electronic speech."
Hector's ears turned red. "I didn't mean anybody was unwelcome. I just don't like SEs. Salesmen in sheep's clothing if you ask me."
"I'd still like to know what an SE is," Stan complained.
"Systems Engineer." Desi hopped in. "Used to call them Systems Analysts. Back when software was free they wrote specs for computer programmers to implement. Now they're just demo jocks for hardware salesmen."
"And women," Nancy reminded them.
"Weasels, all of them," Hector insisted. "If they get a sales commission, they're professional liars."
"An SE doesn't get a commission," Nancy argued.
"How do you know?" Hector fired back.
"Hey, folks, we don't need to argue about how demo jocks get paid," Bingo interjected. "Surely we're not THAT bored. Anybody got... a story, perhaps?" There was a long pause.
"How 'bout that cold weather we've been having?" Jack offered. "Have to drive around every morning and break up the ice on my cow ponds, and it's not even November yet."
Stan jumped on that. "You know, I invented a passive solar heating tube once, to prevent cow ponds from icing up."
"How'd it work?" Desi wondered. "Convection?"
"Well, inverse convection actually," Stan explained. "It was two loops at different heights, connected by a pair of tubes." He gestured meaninglessly with his hands. "One loop circulated on the bottom of the pond, the other near the surface. You know, cooled water stops compressing at four degrees Celsius, below that it expands, so the warmer water ends up on the bottom. So the sun heated the upper tube and inverse convection took the warmer water down to the bottom."
"Why would you need the tubes?" Doctor Pfeffer wanted to know. "The water would heat and fall if any dark surface was under the ice."
"Well, it worked fine with my design," Stan insisted. "Problem was, I discovered ranchers didn't want to keep their cow ponds from freezing over."
"No..." Jack protested.
"Gives 'em something to do, driving around to break up the ice. Had no need for my gizmo."
There was a laugh all around.
"You see?" Bingo insisted, "we can entertain ourselves."
"There's only one problem with that story," Brook observed, wiping a glass on his apron. "It's obviously true."
"Ah, yes," I agreed. "A true scientific tall tale must test our credulity."
"Okay," said Mo, rising to the challenge. "We got a Navy contract to study the effects of snow loading and wind shear on the geodesic dome over the South Pole."
"When was this?" asked Doctor Pfeffer.
"You were in Bavaria," Mo quickly explained. "We used a commercial FEA package -- that's Finite Element Analysis -- and simulated up to ten times the snow load and wind than had been observed. We also took advantage of data on how the foundation stakes had shifted over time. The whole dome," he made an upturned bowl shape with his hands "rests on an ice floe, there's no bedrock they could reach. It's staked down, and the stakes have been shifting as the ice deforms. So anyway, we simulated this ten times loading, trying to get the beams to buckle, and instead we broke our software."
"What do you mean, you broke your software?" the Leutenant asked. "Software can't break."
"Well, we went out of the bounds in which our code could deliver reliable results. We'd programmed it to calculate accumulated uncertainty, and stop with an error when results no longer had any significant digits." Mo was pumped up now.
"You programmed it?" Desi asked.
"Yeah," said Mo, "it was just textbook precision analysis, a plus or minus per cent carried around with every floating point value in the simulation. A pain to implement, but trivial in theory."
"But, speaking theoretically," Hector noted, "didn't you say you used a commercial FEA package? Did it come with source code?"
"Uh..."
"And the problem with that story," Brook concluded, "is that it is obviously untrue."
"Yes," said Bingo, "we need to find that point on the separatrix, the fractal boundary between the basins of truth and falsehood. The unstable equilibrium."
"Now you quit talking dirty, Bruce," Jack chided him.
Then Santos took a chug of beer, set down his glass, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and said, "You know, speaking of sleazy weasels, I got a letter today from the FBI." He took an envelope out of his shirt pocket with an official looking seal on the flap and waved it around. "This represents the conclusion of a long and painful saga," he began.
I heard the quiet squeak of chairs being moved a little forward. All faces turned to the proud Spaniard. "This happened when I was back at Cal. State Northridge, in the valley."
"THE valley? You mean where Valley Girls come from?" Bingo was incredulous. "I thought you came here from Barcelona."
"I never actually said that," Santos reminded us. "I'm grew up in Tarzana, California... but I do plan to visit Barcelona for the Olympics in '92 if I'm able."
"Well," I muttered, or something to that effect.
"Anyway," Santo went on, "I had a student do a project in Artificial Life. I suggested the A-Life methodology, and he chose the problem. The methodology was brilliant, if I do say so myself."
"So, what problem did the student choose?" Mo asked teasingly.
"The stock market. Predicting its performance. But let me tell you about the novel approach we took with the A-Life."
"How good were the predictions?" Mo continued with the teasing.
"Amazingly good, but let me tell my story."
"Good luck getting him to shut up," sighed the professor.
"Shut up, Mo," said Santos. It worked. "Okay, the idea was: first of all, real life has a genotype and a phenotype. DNA carries instructions for building the body, the body goes out and reproduces the DNA. So our A-Life should have the same distinction. So we had the DNA be machine code, and the body be neural nets initialized by the code. Then the neural nets would make decisions that might result in the code being reproduced. Second, we had sexual reproduction, including rare mutations, but more importantly gene crossover."
"Is that some kind of transgender thing?" Bingo asked. Brook poured him another beer.
"No, well, at the risk of getting technical," Santos began.
"And why not?" Hector chimed in.
"Each program consisted of a pair of instruction lists. We also had dominant and recessive traits. Each instruction had a dominance code. When code ran, the parser went down a pair of instruction lists in sync, and at each step executed the instruction of the pair that had the highest dominance code. This allowed a recessive instruction to be passed on un- executed until it was matched with a more recessive instruction."
"Boy, that was technical all right," Hector muttered.
"And he hasn't even gotten to the gene crossover yet," Jack added.
"How do you know about DNA?" Santos wondered.
"I breed animals. I know plenty," the rancher assured us.
Santos continued. "Every now and then, during gene reproduction, a pair of instruction lists will switch places beyond a certain point, the crossover point. This has the effect of chopping up long genes, so the system selects for shorter sequences, and sequences that work even when garbled or taken partly out of context."
"Just like real life," Jack added knowingly.
"Yes. That was precisely our goal. Make it as adaptive as N-Life."
"Natural Life?" I hazarded a guess.
"Yes. Of course we took precautions. We ran everything on a virtual machine. We emulated a non-existent computer to run our A-Life code on."
"Why go to all that trouble?" asked Mo.
"So the code couldn't get loose. Technically, each of these self- reproducing code-pair-and- neural-net was a virus, and was dangerous if leaked out to the net. So we made sure there was nowhere for them to leak to by having a virtual machine on our computer that was the only environment they could survive in.
"We also planned to disassemble the creatures after each phase of the research project, but we had some problems with that. Not only did we have to figure out what the code pairs were doing to set matrix values in the neural nets, then we had to figure out what the neural nets were doing. It turned out to be very hard."
"Of course," agreed Doctor Pfeffer, "that is always the problem with neural nets. It exhibits a behavior, but all you get is the matrix values -- no instructions, no explanation."
"Well, I guess we were naive," granted Santos, "but we'd hoped to follow their behaviors through the phases. Well, let me tell you about the phases. First we ran the critters against some simpler models we had, of software agents trading stocks in a simulated market, and let them evolve for billions of generations. We knew that long evolutionary sequences were essential for developing intelligent behavior."
"What do you mean, evolve?" asked Stan.
"Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you about the selection. Some of the creatures got to occasionally choose mates, exchange code pairs, and generate a new code pair with a new neural net. The copying occasionally had errors, to simulate mutation, and the gene crossover I mentioned before. But only the top 5% got to mate, the best ones at guessing the stock prices from the market of agents. The bottom 50% got killed."
"So you were playing with live ammunition," said Leutenant Soma.
"No, we didn't use real money," Santos explained, "it was just a test."
"But you used real extermination on your artificial life," the Leutenant elaborated. "The game was real from the beginning for them."
"And you must have passed the point where one human could understand what they were doing," added Hector. "right out of the chute. You were Neil Armstrong, exploring the unknown!"
"Well, eventually after all the trouble we did have to disassemble the code and try to figure out what the neural nets were doing as much as we were able, helped out by some big iron at a big agency I can't mention.
"Something happened when we discovered that they did better when given 2 hours to predict 1 hour of market computations. We were buffering the market results elsewhere in the system. The creatures had started cracking the rest of the computer to find the answers. Our shared memory scheme had rather flaky security, and they burrowed out into some our buffer space and found the data, which was in an easy to spot plain text format. Of course, we didn't know this.
"Then we ran them against real historic stock market data, but not repetitively because we didn't want them to become over-specialized. Nevertheless they did have an uncanny knack for predicting historical values, which were in a file on disk. Of course they were cracking file system security to see them.
"Next we ran them against a real-time NASDAQ feed, and they started doing very badly again, until we tried giving them 2 days to predict 1 day. Of course this meant there was a buffer full of data for them to sniff. Actually, they also cracked the email spooler, since we were emailing in the feeds from another system, to isolate them from the net somewhat, and by now they were hungry to get the data as soon as possible, to survive any more real- time runs we might do."
"Are you suggesting that the critters were anticipating you?" Bingo asked.
"Well," Santos backtracked, "who knows what they were thinking, if they think, all we could do was observe their behavior, but they were sure poking into everything they could find. Apparently they started cooperating to find a hole in OS security and give their whole process root privilege, as soon as possible after starting a run."
Hector whistled through his teeth.
"And we still didn't know it. But this 2 days to do 1 day thing was throwing us off. We thought we needed a faster computer. And as it happened, a buddy of mine at the Lockheed skunk works in Burbank was getting a new Celestial for his lab, and it was going to be in a highly classified area.
"They probably were going to us it to invert a very large matrix," guessed Bingo, "which is the compute intensive step in analyzing an airframe for stealth capability."
"Well, they never told me, but they did about a month of acceptance tests in a trailer in the parking lot before they moved the supercomputer into the tempest room sciff. They'd had a bad experience with the previous computer they'd bought failing inside the sciff after three days of classified use, and being unable to get it serviced properly. So they were banging on it."
"If this was a couple of years ago that must've been practically a prototype," Hector opined.
"Well, it worked too well for us. My buddy was letting college students bang on this thing, and I brought in my grad student with his code. We were testing against data we were bringing in on diskettes from each day's trading on NASDAQ, so there was no mail spooler to crack. But what we didn't realize was that this system was connected to DARPANET."
Hector shook his head. The Leutenant started to twitch.
"Of course, the creatures did very badly at first, but then they found their way out through a gopher server and stumbled on a New York Stock Exchange feed. It wasn't exactly the NASDAQ but it was close enough to help them survive.
"When they started doing well again we gave them virtual portfolios to manage, and demanded they make an average profit in trading in order to breed. They did badly at first, because now they had to predict the real future, but we just let them run, and eventually they hacked into the Dow Jones system and changed prices in the source of the NASDAQ listings we were getting."
"What?" Bingo sprayed out his drink of beer.
"I don't understand why you are a free man," Jack added.
"Well, it was touch and go there for a while. Actually, the trouble was slow in starting apparently because of an inter-agency squabble between the FBI, the SEC, the Treasury Dept. and the Justice Dept. But eventually a task force swooped in and took us and our computers -- but not the Celestial, just our data tapes from those runs. We ended up in this big Federal tomb downtown, near the old original Pueblo, answering the same questions over and over. Or maybe I should say trying to answer. We had no idea yet what happened."
"Eventually we hired lawyers and fought the whole thing on the grounds that there was no criminal intent. They were ready at one point to let me walk if I testified against my grad student, but I wasn't about to do that. But eventually it worked out okay, and he got this great job at the Miter Corporation. He lives in Tyson's Corners, Virginia, now, and is engaged to a tobacco lobbyist's daughter."
"You didn't do any jail time at all?" asked Jack.
"No, after we helped them figure out what really happened, they dropped the charges and offered the kid that job, since he'd done all the coding. I thought I might be able to swing a research grant, too, but it never happened. And it took them two years to release my computers. That's what this letter is about." He swatted his palm with the long envelope.
"What are you going to do with them? They're surely obsolete," asked Dr. Pfeffer.
"Well, that's the quandary. They are obsolete, and the shipping costs from Washington are out of sight! I can buy better, newer used equipment here for the same price."
Santos chugged down the last of his beer. It took a moment for the room too realize that the tale was told, and then there was laughter, and a little spontaneous applause.
"That was a good, one, Santos," Hector admitted. "But there's a question left unresolved. Are you responsible for what your A-Life does, even if you didn't program it to do it?"
Brook added, "I notice there are twelve of us tonight. Why don't we put it to a jury vote? Hector, what do you think?"
Hector blurted out, "Hell, no, we'd never get any research done at all if we had to answer for the outcome of every failed experiment. How about you, Brook?"
"Well, I'd have to say yes, you are responsible. I'm speaking, mind you, as someone who owns a business near several classified government research installations. If you don't set the parking brake on your car and it rolls into somebody, you're liable for that."
"Well, that's negligence." I offered. "If you took every reasonable foreseeable precaution, I'd say you aren't accountable for the unexpected.
Bingo further elaborated, "I think it depends, on how careful you were and how unexpected the behavior was. I'd have to take it on a case-by-case basis."
"Well, in most cases I'd have to side with Brook. We don't want people building robot hit men and then saying 'I didn't know he'd do that!' in defense."
Leutenant Soma nodded an agreement with this. "I'm with you guys."
"Well, I am for academic freedom, like Hector here," contributed Doctor Pfeffer, "so I'd have to say you are generally not responsible for the unexpected.
"But what about the kid who turned loose that internet worm? You said he cost you a grant because your server was so hosed," Mo argued.
"So we'll put you down as siding with law enforcement here?" the Doctor replied.
"Well, if you'd made a better try at the outset of disassembling the creatures," Desi positioned, "I might be more forgiving, but I think you let this thing get away from you."
"Well, I'm voting yes for responsibility," chipped in Nancy, "because you are legally responsible for your kids, right? And you don't get to write their DNA, or totally simulate their environment. You just take what you get."
"So I guess that leaves me," said Stan. "I'm voting yes, for make them pay for their mistakes, because I generally hate computers. These kids today I try to hire have learned to use a computer instead of thinking. They keep solving the wrong problems."
Brook observed, "actually, we've only heard from eleven jurors. Santos?"
"Well," said Santos, "I don't know. I mean, I'm glad we didn't end up in the Federal pen., but I'm really unsure where to draw the line of responsibility. I mean, we didn't hurt anybody. What if we had?"
"Well, said Brook, "I count seven to three for a conviction, with two maybes."
Stan added, "But there's another ethical issue you haven't addressed: should you be doing this at all? I mean, what's your goal, programs smarter than people? What if they get good lawyers and win property rights, voting rights, maybe even take our planet away from us, since they're smarter and can run it better. Is that what we want?"
And here the conversation broke up into several smaller groups, and Brook went around refilling drink orders. I had to admit Santos' story had given us all something to think about. But I think I was the only one who noticed that the official- looking letter in his pocket was a piece of junk mail from The Washington Spectator, a little political watchdog newsletter that was probably looking for new subscriptions.
Last update 14-Feb-1999 by ABS.
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