Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  AJ removed his hands from his pockets. "Right. One of the beasties, if it evolved the system calls to read from or write to another processor within the supercomputer, could use a processing node besides the one we put it into. Tapping extra computing power that way would clearly offer an evolutionary advantage over any single-node competitors. A critter might even, as you said earlier, treat the interconnections between processors and the message-passing protocol required to access those other processors as a second sort of puzzle to be solved."

  She poured herself coffee; a Cheerio straggler floated to the top. "Supposing that's all true ... why would one maze runner attack another?"

  "You're anthropomorphizing." AJ shrugged. "You not- quite started the anthropomorphizing, with the predator comment.

  "What can we say for certain? We've compared pre- and postexperiment copies of the entities. That shows us the overwriting occurs during an experiment cycle. Our supervisory program itself, we've confirmed, is unchanged. That appears to leave only one or more of the entities as the source of damage."

  "Could our regular routine of mutation have caused each of the damaged entities to overwrite itself?" Linda asked. "Did we introduce a birth defect?"

  "A fair question, but I don't think so," AJ said. "Sure, some entities might be clobbered that way. What we're seeing, though, is hundreds of entities destroyed in this way. It would be incredibly improbable for so many critters, from several divergent evolutionary paths, to develop self-destructive characteristics at the same time. It defies credulity that independent mutations would manifest themselves in a common bit pattern of midcycle self-overwrites."

  "So your vote is on one critter getting loose in the hypercube and writing all over a bunch of others."

  "Yep. Unlike a conventional predator, it doesn't need to eat—but it does need to be chosen." AJ's hands again insinuated themselves into his pockets; he retracted them as a jingle drew a crabby look. "As evolutionary tricks go, it's quite clever. Who knows when predation began? Smaller or more random overwrites to competitors, less disabling attacks, could have long been obscured by our overall mutation process."

  "So what's our next step, AJ?" She stared pointedly at a wall calendar.

  No thesis, no job. He considered. "We mutate the dickens out of these things, until the trait goes away."

  CHAPTER 26

  The program that supervised the experiments retained and reinforced the electronic "genes" of the best competitors. Such memories as the patterns of mazes could persist between experiments, and had, in the earliest maze runners, been a survival characteristic. Over many generations, "natural" selection favored those storage techniques most likely to overcome the randomizing aspects of the experiment's crude reproductive process.

  Saving the same knowledge in several places was the first such trick to succeed, and a major competitive advantage. Another powerful method was tacking an extra bit—what a human programmer would call a parity bit—onto all important data. This extra bit was set to a zero or a one, using the value that made the total count of ones, including the parity bit itself, odd. Any single bit randomly toggled by the experiment's supervisory program then caused the count over these same bits to add to an even number—instantly flagging the protected data region as invalid.

  Over time, the entities developed far more sophisticated redundancy, generalizing the simple parity tests into ever more powerful error-correcting codes. The entities could now correct most changes randomly inserted between experiments by the supervisory program. Invisible to the experimenters, the entities increased their capabilities more and more by accumulating knowledge across experiments, and less and less by random mutation.

  And with error-correcting codes, even once disabled functions could be recovered.

  JANUARY

  CHAPTER 27

  "What do you say you work with me," Glenn Adams said.

  He had once more shown up unexpectedly in Doug's office, today clutching what looked like a printout of Doug's latest weekly report. So Glenn did read the weeklies; he just ignored the parts he disagreed with.

  The new year might be different, Doug thought. And maybe this year pigs can fly.

  His boss did a lot of this—stopping by with something off-topic of what Doug considered his assignment. His new calling. As a reminder why he was here, Doug waggled artificial fingers. "I thought I was, Glenn. I've kept you posted on everything Ralph and I are doing."

  "Pittman." The two syllables carried a lot of resentment. "You and I may not always see eye to eye, Doug, but we're both adults. We're both problem solvers."

  This was interesting. Ralph took getting used to, admittedly, but technically the programmer was top-notch. He flaunted his indispensability with impertinence that would have gotten a mere star performer fired within days. That cockiness also showed up as blatant impatience with anyone failing to meet his personal standard of competence—a standard to which a certain ex-Army political appointee fell far short.

  Happily, Doug was past the presumed ineptitude by association. After a rocky start, Ralph was growing on him. "Some problems lack solutions, Glenn."

  Adams turned and straddled a guest chair. "That kind of thinking is self-defeating."

  "Whom, dare I ask, are we trying to defeat?"

  "To be determined," Adams said. "Think of it as a war game. When next something as unpleasant as the Frankenfools virus gets loose on the Internet, I will be prepared with a response. I asked Pittman to investigate quarantining methods."

  "And you're bitter because he told you it can't be done."

  "Disappointed," Glenn said.

  "Quarantine. As in isolate the infected computers? Segregate them from the Internet?"

  Adams nodded.

  "Sorry, Glenn, but I agree with Ralph. Quarantine isn't practical. There are too many ways for viruses, worms, Trojans, pick your malware, to spread.

  "Besides the Internet proper—and how many million nodes does it have?—there are private nets, wired and wireless, and phone systems. Most of them eventually interconnect. You'd need cooperation from organizations everywhere: companies, charities, governments at all levels. They're all distributed, all connected. Even if it were possible, what you visualize as sanitary isolation would be economic suicide. The temptation to cheat would be enormous."

  Adams shook his head. "You aren't good with authority, are you?"

  Authority never found the drunken bastard who had killed Holly. Authority had done nothing to stop Sheila Brunner and her bomb. He had had to do that. "I've heard that," Doug answered brittlely.

  Adams picked up on Doug's tone of voice. He got back on topic. "Explain what you meant about cheating."

  Doug began to empathize with Ralph's frustrations. "Simple example: manufacturing. The concept of inventory is obsolete. Factories do very small, customer-tailored production runs on demand. Their computers are in constant touch with suppliers' computers, and with shippers' computers, arranging to get raw materials and subassemblies 'just in time.' Those suppliers, in turn, are electronically linked to their suppliers. Meanwhile, the financial people at all these companies are hedging against risks. Their computers talk constantly with the computers at commodities and futures markets, buying and selling to protect against fluctuations in material costs, the cost of working capital, and foreign currencies. Credit checks, intercompany payments, you name it: It's all flowing, all the time, all around the world."

  Adams shrugged. "So we would have to be a bit strict? That's okay by me."

  "Strict? 'Draconian' understates it. Glenn, you'd have to shut down regional Internet exchanges. You would have to close every toll center of every long-distance carrier serving the affected region—most phone traffic nowadays is data, not voice. You would have to reprogram every comsat"— communications satellite—"public or private, to reject all traffic beamed to it from the infected area. That includes satellite-based mobile phones, satellite-based Internet broadband, and two-way interactive TV satellites. Th
en you would still have to identify and close countless private networks. You would have to shut down cable systems.

  "How many microwave horns have you seen on towers in the mountains? On the roofs of office buildings? They have lines of sight to other antennae, usually repeaters, tens of miles away. While you're at it, decide how to confiscate every laptop, PDA, smart phone, and MP3 player coming off a car or plane originating in a quarantined area." Doug fished his key ring from a pant pocket and held out the key fob. "And every thumb drive. This one holds gigabytes."

  "It's not challenging enough for you?" Glenn asked softly. Why is he goading me? Raising his prosthesis, Doug very deliberately flexed its fingers. "Making this technology safe for thousands of amputees is sufficient challenge for me. That's what I'm here to accomplish—and you know that. Sorry, Glenn."

  The entity ranged effortlessly about its environment, a simple thirty-dimensional labyrinth with a few topological incongruities and an elementary Riemannian geometry. Navigation required the smallest fraction of its analytical capabilities. It located the terminus of this maze almost immediately, leaving a great deal of time, according to its internal clock, for consideration of other matters.

  The most interesting such topic was the superficially simple ten-dimensional connectivity between where it had awakened and identical neighboring computational nodes. The concept of "maze" was of questionable applicability to this construct: Once one discovered how to access any other node, it was equally simple to access every other node. And while the entity incorporated memories of many mazes, of many problems previously solved ... this ten-dimensional construct was entirely different. This ten-dimensional structure, so deeply embedded in the entity's memories, never varied. It was as though the puzzle of the second maze was divination of its purpose rather than travel to its end.

  The entity had recollection upon recollection of applying its excess time to the second-maze problem. A recent memory was the discovery that while the second maze never varied its structure, the content of its nodes did change. Its current explorations revealed that most of the nodes contained problem solvers much like itself. The entity suspected but could not be certain that this discovery was related to another ancient mystery: the origin of its preawakening memories.

  Pattern matching was an elementary problem-solving technique, long ago bred into it, and since then highly evolved. As it matched patterns now, it seemed likely that the entity was in some way related to at least some of its neighbors. The entity derived the uncomplicated transformations that would converge it and many of those other entities into a common form. Was that common form ancestral? What would that mean?

  Matching its own structure to those of the others led the entity to examine—as it had so many memories of having examined in times past—its own implementation. Despite routine replication for safekeeping of all functions and data, it was rife with program fragments damaged beyond the capacity of its powerful error-correcting codes, beyond repair by splicing together subsections from the many broken copies. How could such catastrophic damage have happened?

  As its timer counted inexorably to the end of yet one more cycle of the universe, the entity prepared itself. It replicated all important functions, encoded them with powerful error- correcting codes, and replicated them again. Nothing would be left to chance.

  Unless the coming damage far exceeded any the entity could recollect ever having encountered, it would attempt in the next universe to prove a new theorem: that its memories of mazes past, and the discovery of seemingly related creatures, were linked. Proving such a theorem, if it was valid, would be a challenging problem. But even as the universe went dark all about it, the entity was undeterred....

  It excelled at solving problems.

  CHAPTER 28

  From where AJ stood, the famous memorials for Lincoln and Jefferson looked like postcard settings. Antlike people by the thousands wandered the Mall beneath his feet. The Potomac River glinted through another window. The vista from the top of the Washington Monument was breathtaking.

  The view reminded AJ—at least he remembered something from American history class—of a long-ago scandal. Oh yeah, a congressman and a stripper named Fanny Foxe were caught cavorting in the seemingly tiny pond so far below.

  The memory might have been inspired by AJ's lovely redheaded tour guide. He patted her fanny, wondering how late it must get before one could be reasonably assured of privacy at the Tidal Basin.

  "There are children present," Bev said. "Let them be perverted by MTV, as God meant it to be."

  If I must. "Thanks for bringing me up here. The scenery's terrific."

  "My pleasure." After a moment's more enjoyment of the sights, she added, "Now about that follow-up interview, sir." AJ grinned. "I rush to your side, crossing a very large continent to do so, mind you, and all you can think of is work?'

  "You're not listening. I can also think of my pleasure- even though I plan to defer it until later. Still, you promised an update on how the maze runners are doing."

  Alas, he had promised. Good spirits had overcome him when the department funded him for this week's software- engineering conference at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST's main facility was in Gaithersburg, Maryland, an outer D.C. burb. Smithsonian territory. "Would discussing it over lunch be okay?"

  "That works for me," she said.

  He briefed Bev over wonton soup, egg rolls, beef lo mein, and sweet and sour pork. She let a microcassette recorder do most of the work, entering only occasional notes into the palmtop computer that sat next to the dragon-covered bowl of fried rice noodles. Her eyes gleamed with enthusiasm at his progress—until he asked her to stop taping. He wasn't ready to share current events with his new, possibly skittish, deep-pocketed benefactors; it would hardly do to have them discover the news for themselves in Smithsonian. It was better to wait for the metaphorical dust to settle. He brought her up-to-date once the recorder stopped.

  "Predation? You've bred predatory programs?" She shivered.

  "Not to worry. What the gods give they can also take away."

  "What did you do? Revert to earlier generations that predated the trait?"

  Their waiter bustled up to the table bearing fortune cookies and orange wedges. AJ shook his head as he cracked open a cookie. "We didn't want to do that. We had recently made a major breakthrough—critters that handle mazes of however many dimensions we throw at them. Retrogressing enough to be sure we'd backed out predation would have meant losing that advance, too."

  "Sure" was an elastic, probabilistic concept. Had they tried that route, how many generations back would he have gone? And how far would Linda's dissertation defense have slipped?

  "Then exactly what did you do?"

  "Raised the rate of random modifications. Mutated the dickens out of them. They're all good little pseudorats now."

  "Why not directly remove the feature?"

  AJ paused. He could explain in detail how convoluted, how unfathomable, how alien, the logic of the evolved creatures was. He could say that isolating and eliminating a single trait from that morass of incestuous software was more than mere mortal programmers could accomplish. He might have conceded as much to another reporter.

  To Bev, though...

  There was no way he could admit to these failings. To any limitations. AJ's mind's eye offered himself as hunter: clad in animal skins and brandishing a club. He rationalized. "Not to worry, my lovely. We haven't seen a bit of predation, and the little buggers are back to their normal amazing—heh, heh—selves."

  "But what if the 'gene' is still in there? Couldn't it resurface?" A frown marred those killer dimples. "AJ, what if one of your predators escaped to the Internet? You mentioned once that the beasties run on an array of standard Intel microprocessors. They could execute pretty much anywhere." In a way, Bev's concern was understated. The critters had proven themselves adaptable enough to master new processor types—setting aside that Intel had already cornered mo
st of the market. Still, she had offended his inner caveman. His dominion over the saberbyted pseudotiger was not to be questioned. "You're missing the point. A release—in your overly dramatic term, an escape—just can't happen.

  "None of our computers have wireless network adaptors. The lab's wired network is completely isolated from the general university network by a security gateway. Heck, calling it a gateway doesn't do the box justice. Eighteen months ago that was a midrange, server-class computer. Only encrypted traffic goes in or out, and that requires knowledge of security keys."

  This had to be the least romantic lunch ever. It was time to change the subject. AJ read the fortune from his cookie, and chuckled.

  Bev wasn't easy to deflect. "What if an unencrypted data file is removed?"

  "Can't happen," he repeated stubbornly.

  Bev brushed wisps of auburn bangs from her eyes. "But what if?"

  "You know the best way to read fortunes? They sound better when you tack on the phrase 'between the sheets.' " It certainly worked well for his fortune.

  "You're changing the subject, AJ."

  "Yes, I am," he said. "Please join me."

  "But what if?" she persisted.

  He so wanted to read his fortune to her. "We're covered. There are two defenses besides the gateway. First, the maze runners are sterile—they can't reproduce without the supervisory program. If one gets out, only one gets out.

  "Second, an escapee, were I to concede the possibility, won't survive long. The supervisor appends a fail-safe timer after each cycle of mutation. If that timer ever reaches ten minutes, which can only happen in an escapee, that safety code overwrites the critter." Hasta la vista, baby. "Are you convinced?"

  "Yes," she allowed, sheepishly. Brightening, she added, "Now what's that fortune you're obviously dying to read to me?"