Cyber Rogues Read online

  “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.”

  “Why not?” FISE inquired.

  “Because you’re still standing up, that’s why you dumbhead, Before you start eating you should be sitting down.” Hector promptly grabbed the plate and sat down on the floor. Ron moaned miserably, dragged himself over to the nearest cubicle and stood pounding his forehead on its top panel. “I can’t stand it. I’m gonna wind up as nuts as it is. Chris, do something with it for Christ’s sake.”

  Eventually Dyer and Laura left Chris still tapping to the accompaniment of Ron’s yelling and moved away from the lab area and back toward Dyer’s office. On the way, Laura reminded him that they had not yet looked at the TITAN notes she wanted to check over, and suggested they could do so over lunch. Dyer hesitated instinctively for a second, then agreed. What the hell? he thought. For once Laura had seemed to go out of her way to avoid being trying.

  When they passed Betty’s desk, she gave him a message that Hoestler wanted to talk to him first thing after lunch.

  “You’d better bring your coat,” he said to Laura.

  “I’m going to have to throw you out as soon as we finish. I won’t be coming directly back to the lab.”

  While Laura was slipping on her coat, he noticed that Pattie was at her desk, poring diligently over the figures in front of her and seemingly terrified of lifting her eyes from them. Which reminded him . . .

  “You go on,” he said to Laura as she moved toward the door. “I’ll join you out in the corridor. There’s one quick thing I’ve just remembered.”

  A few seconds later he strode into the office that Al Morrow was using and closed the door softly behind him. Al looked up from the coding sheets he had been checking. His face started to break into a grin, then fell abruptly as he saw the expression on Dyer’s face.

  “You’re making a prize asshole of yourself,” Dyer stated simply. “I’m telling you here and now to pack it in.”

  Al flinched as if he had been struck in the face. Then the color started rising from his collar and a look of pained indignation compressed his features. He swallowed hard and his grip tightened visibly on the armrest of his chair.

  “I guess I haven’t been keeping very good time,” he mumbled awkwardly. “Okay. All I can say is I’ll put that right. Today was kinda—” Dyer cut him off with a curt shake of his head.

  “It’s not just that and you know it. I’m talking about all this screwing around with Pattie. You’re making it a public spectacle and that isn’t a smart thing to do. I’m telling you to wise up.”

  “I don’t want to get into an argument, Ray,” Al protested weakly. “But that’s a kinda personal matter, if you know what I mean. What I do in my own time outside the—” Dyer shut him up again with a wave of his hand. He knew what was coming next. He had already heard all the outraged justifications and noble speeches in defense of young love threatened in its prime.

  “I know what you’re gonna say. Just don’t say it,” Dyer went on. “You’re acting as if you just found out about sex for the first time in your life. Well maybe you have, but the rest of the world knew all about it a long time ago so we don’t wanna hear about it. Okay?”

  Al turned a deep shade of scarlet and glanced around as if looking for a convenient black hole to jump into. Dyer observed him with satisfaction and allowed his tone to soften a fraction.

  “As far as I’m concerned there are two Patties,” he said. “One lives outside this place and does what the hell she pleases and the other one works for me. The one that works for me is company business because the company has paid for her time, not you. And I’m telling you what a professor told me when I was at Harvard Medical School: ‘Thou shalt not dip thy quill in company ink!’ That’s all I’ve got to say. From this point on it’s forgotten. Okay?”

  A couple of minutes later he rejoined Laura in the corridor outside.

  “Sorry about that,” he said as they began walking. “We’ve been having a slight staff problem.”

  “Pattie mixed up in it?” Laura inquired casually. He turned his head toward her in surprise.

  “Yes. Who told you?”

  “Nobody,”
Laura replied lightly. “Just feminine insight.”

  “Oh Christ. We’re not back to that, are we?”

  Laura gave a short laugh.

  They walked on in silence until they emerged into the main corridor that led to the staff restaurant.

  “I was thinking while I was waiting for you,” Laura told him. “Why is he called FISE. Does it stand for anything in particular?”

  “Functional Integration using Simulated Environment,” Dyer said.

  “Oh. I see. That sounds impressive.”

  “But Chris has got his own version.”

  “Really? What does Chris call it?” Laura asked.

  Dyer grinned. “Fastest Idiot Seen on Earth,” he told her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “So was that what they call an intelligent computer?” Laura’s voice was lined with mildly mocking satisfaction as she removed the plate of curried chicken from the small dispensing hatch in the wall at the end of the booth. Dyer turned his head from gazing out over the river far below the window alongside them. He missed the intonation and answered her matter-of-factly.

  “It’s obviously got a long way to go yet, but it’s about as advanced as anything you’ll find anywhere.”

  “Advanced!” She stared at him incredulously. “Ray, if you weren’t looking so serious you’d have to be joking. If that was an intelligent machine, Stegosaurus was a genius.”

  “Aw, you’re missing the whole point,” he told her with a shadow of irritation as he realized the turn the conversation was taking. “Computers are evolving backward.”

  “If that means they’re becoming more stupid, I think I agree with you.”

  “No. I didn’t mean that and you damn well know it.” He paused in the middle of picking up his fork. “Look. In natural evolution, instincts came first, common sense later and intellectual capabilities last. It had to be that way because the only thing that mattered was the ability to survive. An animal has to develop an awareness of its environment and learn how the things in that environment operate if it figures on staying around for very long. Intelligence as we understand it has an enormous survival value too, but that comes later.”