Cyber Rogues (6 page)

“What we’re doing is programming a learning computer to build up its own generalized conceptual framework with experience,” Ron was saying. “The idea is to get it to be able to recognize and apply reasonable constraints when it attempts to develop a problem-solving strategy. That make sense?” Laura frowned and shook her head reproachfully.

“Sorry, Ron, I don’t speak computerese. You’ll have to put that into English.”

“It means we’re finding out how to give machines common sense,” Dyer supplied, moving forward to join them. “When a baby’s born, it doesn’t know anything about the basic properties of the universe that it finds itself in or the other objects that exist there along with it. What it does have is a basic programming that enables it to form general concepts from a few specific lessons. So it can learn by experience as it gets older. What we’re doing is developing ways of providing that kind of basic programming for a machine.”‘

“It’s called an IQ transplant,” Chris murmured from his console without looking up.

“You mean like a kid doesn’t need to go round burning itself on everything in the house to get the message that hot things hurt?” Laura offered after a moment’s reflection.

Dyer nodded. “That kind of thing and more basic stuff too.”

“How do you mean, more basic stuff?” Laura asked.

“The kind of thing that you have to know before you can even stretch your hand out to touch something,” Dyer said. “All the things that are so obvious that you don’t even realize you had to learn them once. But to a computer they’re not obvious at all. We’re finding out how to teach it.” Laura was staring at him suspiciously. He went on, “Even a child of two has a mental model of objects occupying a three-dimensional space, and of itself being one of them. It can interpret visual patterns on its retina in terms of that space. It knows that objects fall if they’re unsupported, that two of them can’t be in the same place at the same time, that they continue to exist when you can’t see them . . . that hard things can break and soft things can bend . . . things like that. Those things go together to set up a child’s pattern of basic knowledge of the world around it. When it’s given a problem to solve or when it sets out to perform some task, it automatically applies constraints, based on what it’s learned, that enables it to separate the possible approaches that make sense from the ones that don’t.”

“Any problem at all is simple to solve when you take away all the constraints,” Ron chipped in.

“Any problem at all?” Laura sounded distinctly skeptical.

“If the cat’s got fleas, one guaranteed way of getting rid of them is to throw the cat in the incinerator,” Chris came in. “Intense heat is a fail-safe way of killing fleas.”

“The problem is it kills cats too,” Ron said. “But when you gave me the problem you didn’t tell me I wasn’t supposed to do that. You assumed my own common sense would tell me that part of it. Except I happen to be a computer. I don’t have any common sense.”

“The solution is quite simple until you start applying commonsense constraints to it,” Dyer summarized. “The more common sense you have, the more you’ll constrain the acceptable solutions. So the decisions get tougher but the answers are more effective.”

Laura traced a long, red-painted nail slowly along the glass top of the tank while she digested what had been said. Then she looked up and tossed her hair from the side of her face in the same motion.

“Okay, I think I can see what you’re getting at,” she said. “So how do you begin getting a machine to think like that?”

“By making it do exactly what a baby has to do,” Dyer told her. “We give it a world to grow up in and learn from.” He caught Laura’s puzzled look and turned toward Chris. “How’s Hector today?”

“Oh, he’s feeling okay,” Chris replied. “We had him running earlier. Want a demo for Laura?”

“Why not?” Dyer answered. Despite herself, Laura was becoming intrigued. She watched as Chris exchanged a brief dialogue with the console. Then a white iridescent glow appeared suddenly, pervading the entire volume of the tank. Laura jumped back instinctively with a squeal. Dyer grinned. After a few seconds the glow condensed into patches of color that quickly coalesced and stabilized into a vivid and detailed holographic image.

The image was a miniature representation of a one-story house, looking to all intents and purposes like a real, solid children’s doll house, complete with fittings and furnishings. When Laura approached it again and studied it more carefully, however, she realized that all the objects represented were gross oversimplifications of the things they were supposed to be, rather than accurate models. It suggested the kind of surroundings that might have been created for a three-dimensional children’s cartoon. Laura looked at Dyer inquiringly.

“That’s FISE,” Dyer explained, pointing at one of the cubicles nearby. “The image in the tank is FISE’s world. We’ve given him a very simple world so that he can get his basic concepts straight without having to worry about lots of complications that exist in the real one.”

“How do you know it’s a him?” Laura challenged absently as she continued to study the image. Dyer raised his eyes momentarily toward the ceiling in a silent plea far patience.

“It’s a him because we made it a him,” Ron declared flatly. His glare dared her to dispute the rationale behind that
.
Dyer breathed silent relief when Laura merely sniffed, evidently electing not to take the point further. Chris waited patiently until the rumblings had died away and then touched another key. Immediately a figure appeared standing in the kitchen of the miniature house. Like the rest of the image, it was a cartoon caricature devoid of detail—just a face defined by a few lines, a mop of curly hair and a man’s body clad in a red shirt and blue pants.

“That’s Hector,” Dyer informed her, “He lives in FISE’s world along with a few other characters. We give FISE problems to solve and he attempts to solve them by manipulating Hector. Actually, FISE thinks he is Hector. Representing things visually like this is the best way of knowing what’s going on inside FISE’s mind. We can see straight away from the things he makes Hector do exactly what he knows and what he hasn’t figured out yet. When he screws something up we straighten him out, after which he never makes the mistake again but usually goes straight on and screws something else up. As I said before, it’s like having a baby that has to be told all the things that Nature normally programs it to be able to work out instinctively.”

“Let’s take it through the breakfast routine again,” Ron suggested, directing his words at Chris. “There were still some funny things going on last time. I’d like to see it cleaned up.”

Chris made no direct response but resumed tapping commands into the console, Laura looked from one side to the other and then at Dyer.

“What’s the breakfast routine?” she asked.

Dyer motioned toward the tank. Hector had begun walking around the table toward the refrigerator. He opened the door and began transferring various items out and onto the working surface next to the stove.

“You see, FISE knows quite a lot already,” Dyer commented. “He knows how to move Hector’s legs to make him move across the room. He knows that Hector has to go around the table and not through it, that he can’t get the things he wants out of the refrigerator unless the door’s open and that to move them Hector has to be looking in the right direction and has to pick them up with his hands. All kinds of stuff like that.”

“Watch him picking up the eggs,” Ron said, pointing. “See . . . nice and gently. And watch how carefully he puts them down. He knows enough about eggs to realize that they don’t last long if they’re treated rough.”

Laura watched in fascinated silence for a few seconds.

“How does he know that?” she asked, unconsciously accepting the machine’s disputed gender. “Does he know what the shell’s made of and work it out from there or something?”

“No,” Dyer replied from the opposite side of the tank. “FISE has already learned it the hard way. Actually there are more computers involved than FISE. FISE only controls Hector and knows as much as Hector knows. The environment that Hector lives in is all managed by a team of computers that fills two of the other cubicles. Their collective name is PROPS. PROPS monitors everything that Hector does that affects his environment and computes the consequences accordingly. If Hector slams the egg down too hard PROPS will cause it to smash. Hector doesn’t know why it smashed but PROPS does. All Hector knows is that it did and not to do it that way again.”

“Ah, I’m beginning to see now . . .” Laura’s voice trailed away for a moment. “Hector, in other words FISE, is simply confronted by an environment that’s full of things that behave in particular ways that it has to find out about. What he has to do is connect causes with effects and make general inferences from what he learns.” She looked at Dyer expectantly. “Am I right?”

“Pretty much,” Dyer nodded. “Actually he’s very rational when it comes to purely physical interactions with his environment. After all, that kind of thing only involves well-defined physical laws, and he is a computer. Where he has problems is with understanding what he
shouldn’t do,
not what he
can’t
do. Again, it’s this question of common sense.”

“What do you mean . . . ethics or something?” Laura frowned at him.

“You’ll see,” he replied. They returned their attention to the tank. Hector had by now put a pan on the stove and switched the stove on, an achievement which, judged by Ron’s whoop of approval, represented a new pinnacle of intellectual development that Hector had been struggling valiantly to attain for some time. He then picked up a stick of butter and stood looking at it, giving every impression of bringing profound powers of concentration to bear on some problem.

“What’s he doing?” Laura asked.

Ron shook his head and emitted a sigh of exasperation.

“He knows how much butter is needed to fry an egg, but he can’t figure out how to get that much out of the wrapper,” he said. “The first time he tried it, he sliced a piece off of the end with the knife and threw it in the pan, wrapper and all. We told the dummy you don’t fry pieces of wrappers with food and to come up with something better next time. He’s thinking about it.”

Ron’s ruddy face took on a sudden look of wonder. He leaned forward and peered down into the tank excitedly. “He’s actually unwrapping it!” he roared in unconcealed delight, though with a strong undertone of sarcasm. “Go on, Hector. Attaboy, Yeah . . . see, it’s easy. You can do it.” Ron’s face creased abruptly into a frown. “Oh my God!” He turned his eyes away in anguish and pointed disbelievingly at the tank. Hector had carefully placed the intact egg inside the pan.

“Chris,” Ron pleaded. “Ask him what the f—” He caught sight of Laura just in time. “Ask him what he thinks he’s doing, willya?” Chris remained expressionless and input a stream of symbols to the computer. A baritone voice issued at once from the audio grille set to one side of the main panel.

“I’m frying the egg,” it said.

Laura jerked around in surprise.

“It’s okay,” Dyer reassured her. “That’s only FISE. We only use voice channels one-way. By using the touchboard to talk to him, at least we can be sure that he understood exactly what we said. If you added possible semantics problems on top of all this, the whole thing would become ridiculous.”

Ron was pacing back and forth before the tank, opening and clenching his fists as if struggling to fight down rising impatience.

“FISE,” he said, in a voice that had to be forced to remain slow and reasonable, the kind of voice one would use when talking to a persevering but hopelessly backward child. “How are you going to eat the egg when you’ve fried it?” At the console, Chris silently translated Ron’s question into touchboard commands.

“With the knife and fork, off the plate, on the table,” FISE replied proudly.

“Very good, FISE,” Ron approved in dulcet tones. Then his voice began on a slightly higher note and rose rapidly to end in a shriek. “How are you going to cut the egg with the knife when it’s still inside the goddam shell?” Chris conveyed the essential information via the console.

“I wasn’t very sure about that,” FISE confessed. “But you told me I wasn’t supposed to break eggs.”

“It’s okay to break an egg if you want to fry it,” Ron said, having regained his composure. Hector promptly picked the egg out of the pan, crushed it in his fist and held it out for the resulting mess to drip back into the pan. Laura made a face and gave an involuntary exclamation of disgust.

“Now you can see the kind of thing I meant,” Dyer commented. “Totally rational solutions but no commonsense constraints.”

“Now FISE, we’re gonna try it again,” Ron was saying “What you have to remember is that you don’t want any bits of shell in the rest of the egg that you’re going to eat. Got that? All you have to do is figure out how you’re going to end up with the shell in the trash can and the rest of the egg in the pan. Okay?”

“How about the fat?” FISE asked after pondering on his mission for a while.

“What about it?” Ron was momentarily nonplused.

“Do I not want any fat on the rest of the egg either?”

Ron spun around as if he had just been addressed by an angel from Heaven.

“Hey! He’s trying to generalize! For you, FISE, that was a pretty smart question. Very
good!
No, the fat’s okay but try and keep it to a minimum. Right,” he said to Chris when Chris had finished translating. “Reset it to square one and let’s give it another whirl.”

“You can see now why we picked a very simple world,” Dyer said to Laura while Chris was resetting the program. “It’s so easy to forget things like the fat because they’re so obvious to humans. If we made it any more complex we’d be tying ourselves in knots trying to keep track of what’s going on.”

In the session that followed, Hector succeeded in cracking the egg with the back of a knife and ended up cooking a satisfactory meal. Eventually Hector managed, after several false moves, to transfer the meal to a plate and convey it back to the table.

“Wait, wait, wa-it a second, FISE,” Ron groaned wearily. “You can’t start eating it yet.”