Chapter 17: 7:00. Symbolic Life And Fanatic Deathmatch Among The Computer Bums (pt. 1)

"Freeman! Oh kick ass, you actually made it!"

"Uh, thanks," I said, still unsure about this. After much cajoling by Gil and Anne (who'd somehow wheedled my number out of him,) I'd finally agreed to come to the CS department's gaming night - mostly to placate Gil, who'd been bugging me about it for several weeks (and seemed determined to stay in contact since I moved out of the men's dorm, for some reason,) but I could definitely use a distraction from present circumstances...

I looked around. I'd expected the computer lab they were using to be like the writing lab in the liberal-arts building, a nice little classroom with neat little rows of workstations; instead, we were holed up in a repurposed basement storeroom, with equipment strewn all over. I wondered why, but then I saw the behemoth on the far wall.

Gil had told me about the ancient computer they were restoring - property of the physics lab, once upon a time - but I'd never seen it "in the flesh." It was less monstrous than I'd imagined; I thought of truly old computers as being room-filling industrial equipment, rows of cabinets with big reel-to-reel tape decks and card punches like you saw on Star Trek when they'd visit the 20th century, but this was only the size of a commercial refrigerator, and was done up in white and green - call it the "Spearmint 2000," I thought. Still, it dwarfed even the monolithic high-end tower PCs that lined the rest of the lab.

The giant was sleeping, though; the cover was off one part of the cabinet, and a few people were huddled around a large circuit board set on one of the desks. I caught the acrid scent of solder fumes, and hoped that the room was better-ventilated than it seemed. Not that it makes any difference to me now...

"Sweet, isn't it?" Gil said as he ushered me in. "Something fried on the ALU, though; we're trying to trace it. The DACs finally got fixed and calibrated, so if we can sort this out we should be able to do a Spacewar! tourney."

"It's, uh, it's great," I said. Part of me wondered why they went to all the trouble, but I'd seen enough of him tinkering with his own machines to know that it was equal parts novelty, challenge, retro chic, and a peculiar sense of cultural heritage that "hacker"^* types seemed to share. Was there a similar enthusiast culture for antique automata? Maybe in forty years I'd be getting checkups and repairs from those people...

^* (A term which Gil had lectured me on the "true" meaning of within twenty minutes of our first meeting.)

Everyone not focused on the repair job noticed us coming in, and in moments I was the center of attention. "Holy hell," said one of the guys, a stocky, shaggy-haired, beardy fellow with horn-rimmed glasses that must've fallen out of a time warp from 1978, "we heard about you, but I didn't really believe it. It's really all gears and springs and things in there?"

I felt like blushing and shrank back a bit. He didn't seem to mean anything by it, but having a bunch of people staring at me and asking what my insides were like was just a tad awkward. "I...I dunno," I said. "I haven't exactly gone in for an X-ray like this. But...I mean, it seems like it."

"Omigod, your voice!" said the girl manning the soldering iron, barely glancing up from her work. She was dressed in a plain black T-shirt and blue jeans, tattered and worn, and had a pair of headphones hung around her neck; she appeared to be albino. The tips of her milk-white hair were dyed fluorescent purple, and I could just see that her eyes were outlined in kohl; she had a pair of mirrored wraparound sunglasses perched on her head, and a long black coat hung on the back of her chair. "What is that, like a reed organ blowing into a resonator? Nah, not quite... Christ, I wanna sample it."

"Conventional X-ray wouldn't work," put in a younger man, the most normal-looking of the bunch, "not if the body's metal. You'd need to do a CT scan for that."

"Right, Joshua, right," the beardy guy said. "I'm just thinking about the practicalities; how d'you implement a whole system capable of emulating a person in that amount of space, with that level of technology? Criminy, have you people even seen mechanical adding machines? You'd need a whole room just to-"

"There you go again, jumping straight to brute force!" someone shouted from over by the soldering iron. He was enormously rotund and a bit baby-faced, but he could project like a professional opera singer; I felt his exclamation ripple through me, and from the look on his face Gil did, too. "Whaddya think, that every problem is just a matter of throwing hardware at it? Hell, they did SHRDLU on a PDP-6!"

"...Which took up how much room, despite being solid-state?" the beardy guy said. "I think I've made my point."

"Your 'point' is asinine," the big guy shot back. "The real point is, you don't get there by 'emulating a person' at all. You model the problem - comprehending and adapting to the world and society - and construct a solution suited to the platform you're targeting. God, people like you would-"

The other guy started talking over him; I tuned them out and stared at Gil in confusion. "What the hell are they on about...?" At first it'd felt like I was being vivisected, but as soon as they started arguing with each other, it was like my actual presence was entirely redundant to the conversation about me.

He chuckled. "Ah, don't mind them, Stu; they're always like this. It's just something we've been talking about - how do you implement something with the complexity of the human brain in something as comparatively large-scale as clockwork machinery?"

"...In other words, how do I even exist?"

"More like, how do you function," he said, which made me feel a little weird again. "Obviously you exist, and you work - we're just curious about the details. Engineer mindset, 'nuff said."

"You should've been here earlier," Anne said, appearing behind me out of nowhere; I nearly jumped. "They were bickering about, uh, determinism and whether mechanical variance could introduce meaningful uncertainty without, uh, making her whole...system...unstable. I, uh, thought there was going to be blood."

"Hot damn, that did it!" exclaimed the girl with the soldering iron. "All checks out now. Josh, get the tape with the display hacks, wouldja?"

"Meaningful uncertainty...?" I said. I'd been trying not to think about it ever since that dream, but it'd been nagging at the back of my mind: to what extent was I a machine? Literally, sure; but the term had been associated with mindless, automatic operation for so long that it was only recently seeing pushback from robots.^* And I couldn't help thinking that, if the criterion was blind deterministic response to stimuli with no means of escape from pre-ordained outcomes, then I must have already been one for a long, long time...

^* (Mostly because there weren't many of them, and they weren't temperamentally prone to raising a ruckus. And while the use of "mechanical" to refer to mindless drudgery and the reading of "machine" as "mere machine" were considered awkward, they actually preferred "machine intelligence" to "artificial intelligence," which just confused matters. It was an ongoing debate.)

"Well, you know," Gil said, "it's a whole debate in AI research - is the goal to reproduce the specific behaviors of natural intelligence in existing lifeforms, or to create synthetic models that satisfy our criteria for 'intelligent' life?"

Anne nodded. "A lot of academia goes for the, ah, 'pure' approach, but we've yet to engineer anything as adaptable as humans or...transformed machine intelligences. So there's...a lot of argument over the role of, uh, natural instability in producing what we consider 'intelligence.'" She gave me an eerie smile. "And with you...tolerances are so much looser with analog mechanisms..." A shudder ran up my metaphorical spine, and I wondered again what her dorm room looked like.

"So," I said, "so...the idea is that everything that would make me a person and not a...a 'machine' is due to...random variance...?" Was I only ever a "person" by chance?

"Well, that's one line of argument," Gil said. "It's nothing like settled. I mean, we've known for ages that simple, deterministic systems can show complex behaviors; what we haven't figured out yet is how to get from there to where we want to be, so we don't know if it's possible. But-" He glanced back at the behemoth. "Oh, hey, speak of the devil...!"

We turned to look. One side of the hulking cabinet held a display, and on it... It took me a bit to even tell what I was looking at. The screen was filled with scattered dots, but the pattern was changing. Certain clumps were joining together, or spreading out, or just quivering in place. As I watched, the field evolved from homogenous noise into groups of common patterns; some flying away, some puffing up and coughing out other things...it was kind of mesmerizing, like watching an aquarium.

"That's, uh, faster than it was running before," Anne said, impressed.

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Soldering-iron girl nodded. "Benjamin optimized it."

Big guy puffed out his chest, or so I assumed from the inrush of air; the visual effect was lost under the rest of him. "Totally rewrote the backend," he said proudly. "Like I said: choose a model that suits the problem, and construct a solution that suits the platform."

"Cram it," said beardy guy. "You got the whole thing from Abrash and we both know it."

"Abrash wasn't coding for PDP-12, Jonathan. I did all the dirty work, thankyouverymuch. And you might as well criticize a biochemist for cribbing from God."

Jonathan was about to fire back when Joshua looked up from his phone. "Hey, pizza's here."

"About time," soldering-iron girl said. "Jon, go get that. The rest of us need something to stop up your word-holes with."

"What're you, Esther, my mother?"

She gave him a Look, and he shrugged and went; she went over to a little mini-fridge that had been tucked away in one corner of the room. I turned back to the display; I'd been totally lost trying to follow the conversation, anyway. "So...what am I looking at, here?"

"The Game of Life," Esther said matter-of-factly. "Uh, Stuart, right?"

I frowned. "...Not the board game," I said, confused.

"Not the board game," Gil chuckled. "Conway's Life. The canonical cellular automaton."

"A what, now?" I grimaced slightly; I'd been feeling a little sensitive about that term ever since this happened to me.

"It's, uh, just a set of rules applied to a grid," Anne explained. "Each dot is a 'cell.' There's only three rules, dictating when a cell, um, 'dies' or 'lives' onto the next generation."

I stared back at the screen, watching the little shapes roam around the field. "That's it? But they're moving..."

Gil shook his head. "One shape in the prior generation produces a new shape in the next based on the ruleset, that's all. Like I was saying: simple systems exhibiting complex behaviors."

I watched it for a while longer. The patterns weren't very complex - a few minutes of observation covered the general trends - but surprising things could still happen; two shapes could collide and turn into a completely different pattern that might then blossom into another common shape instead of fizzling out, et cetera. Maybe it wasn't like an aquarium so much as watching bacteria on a microscope slide. "You really think of this as 'life?'" I asked Gil.

He shrugged. "Depends how you define it," he said. "If-"

"'If you call that living!'" Benjamin interjected with a cackle.

Gil suppressed a snort. "If-if you compare this to biological life...they're structures composed of simple 'cells,' they reproduce in the right circumstances, and in a sense they respond to 'stimulus' from the presence of neighboring cells. But they only 'grow' in a limited sense, and they don't adapt to their surroundings. They don't have a drive to self-perpetuate, it just happens. But it does suggest that you don't need anything magic for some level of 'order' to arise out of chaos."

"Which, ah, gets back to you," Anne said. She was looking at me with the expression she had when she first saw me like this, a mixture of awe, envy, and...longing? that would've made my scalp crawl, if it weren't made of felt. "Any one of the parts, um...inside you...might be simple, but it interacts with its neighbors, and they with theirs, and when you're all the way down the, ah, the line, the potential complexity of the system is...orders of magnitude higher than that one part."

"Which still doesn't address practicality," Jonathan said, returning with the pizzas. "I accept, in theory, that such a machine can exist; what I want to know is how a machine of the necessary complexity fits inside a human-sized figure, and for any proposed solution, how one solves the problem of torque vs. durability at the given size and materials for the components."

"And you're back to 'necessary complexity' again!" Benjamin railed. "Am I going to have to beat you over the head with a Turing machine?"

"...which nobody actually uses, because purely symbolic computation is an instructive hypothetical model but completely inefficient for any practical-"

"Both of you!" Esther groaned, slamming a beer bottle down on the table loud enough to make us all jump. "Shove some damn pizza in your mouths, before I shove it somewhere else!" She glanced down at the bottle, which was rapidly churning up inside. "Crap. Nobody open that one. Just...let's get some food going, and then let's do some friggin' gaming already."

Joshua nodded. "We'll let the big guy burn-in for a while before we try playing on it. Don't want any bitching 'bout glitching. Hey, uh, newbie - you can use your campus login. Gil, you wanna show your friend where to find the good stuff?"

"Sure, sure," Gil said, while I got logged in. "Here, Stu..."

He showed me where to find the folder they'd hidden the games in; installing stuff wasn't technically allowed per IT policy, but the CS students got away with it since they needed local admin privileges for a significant portion of their coursework. He leaned in close over me to point to the different subdirectories as I navigated; it was oddly distracting. Probably because he's taller than me now, I thought, my internal tempo accelerating slightly. I'm not used to seeing him from this point of view...

I shook my head, trying to focus.

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