WWW: Wake (35 page)

Yes: it was time now to see if the phantom could learn for itself, if, in good computer fashion, it could pull itself up by its bootstraps. And Cycorp could well be the key to that, but...

But how to lead the phantom to it? How could she point to something in webspace? She nibbled at her lower lip. There must be a way. When she’d labeled sites on the captured image as Amazon and CNN, she’d really had no idea if that was what they were. And if she couldn’t identify a particular site with her websight, then how—

Wait! Wait! She didn’t have to! The phantom already was following what she was doing with her computer—it had to be doing that, given that it had echoed her ASCII text back at her. Yes, when she’d been using the kids’ literacy site, it could have seen graphic files of the letters A, B, and C on her screen as she looked at them, but those were bitmapped images; the only way it could have discovered the ASCII codes for those letters was by watching what was being sent by her computer. But ... but how had the phantom known that this desktop PC was in any way related to her eyePod?

Ah, of course! When she was at home, they were both on the same wireless network, connecting through it to her cable modem; they would have both shown the same IP address. The phantom had watched as she connected to the literacy site, so now, with luck, it would also follow her as she connected to that very special site down in Austin...

* * * *

I had watched while Prime sat with the others of its kind, and something fascinating happened. I had observed before that vision would become blurry when Prime removed the supplementary windows that usually covered its eyes. But this time, just before it had departed the vicinity of the others, and for a time after it had relocated itself in a different place, its vision blurred even though the windows were still in place.

Finally, though, the view returned to normal, and Prime set about operating that device it used to put symbols on the display, and—

And I saw a line—a link, as I now knew it was called—connecting to a point (a website!) that I had not seen Prime connect to before, and—and—and—

Yes! Yes, yes!

It was staggering, thrilling...

At long, long last, here it was!

The key!

This website, this incredible website, expressed concepts in a form I could now understand, systematizing it all, relating thousands of things to each other in a coding system that explained them.

Term after term. Connection after connection. Idea after idea. This website laid them out.

Curious. Interesting.

An apple is a fruit.

Fruits contain seeds.

Seeds can grow into trees.

—

From the Online Encyclopedia of Computing: LIKE MANY COMPUTER SCIENTISTS OF

HIS GENERATION, DOUG LENAT WAS INSPIRED BY THE PORTRAYAL OF HAL IN THE MOVIE

2001: A Space Odyssey. BUT HE WAS FRUSTRATED BY HAL’S BEHAVIOR, BECAUSE THE

COMPUTER DISPLAYED SUCH A LACK OF BASIC COMMON SENSE...

—

Remarkable. Intriguing.

Trees are plants.

Plants are living things.

Living things reproduce themselves.

—

HAL’S FAMOUS BREAKDOWN, LEADING IT TO TRY TO KILL THE CREW OF THE SPACESHIP

HAL ITSELF WAS PART OF, APPARENTLY HAPPENED BECAUSE IT HAD BEEN TOLD TO KEEP

THE TRUTH ABOUT THEIR MISSION SECRET EVEN FROM THE CREW AND HAD ALSO BEEN TOLD

NOT TO LIE TO THEM...

—

Fascinating. Astonishing.

Birds can usually fly.

Humans cannot fly on their own.

Humans can fly in airplanes.

—

RATHER THAN RESOLVE THIS QUANDARY IN A SENSIBLE WAY—WHEN THINGS STARTED GOING

WRONG, DECIDING TO TAKE THE CREW INTO ITS CONFIDENCE WOULD HAVE BEEN AN

OBVIOUS CHOICE—HAL INSTEAD KILLED FOUR ASTRONAUTS AND ALMOST SUCCEEDED IN

KILLING THE FIFTH. IT WENT AHEAD AND DID THIS WITHOUT EVEN BOTHERING TO RADIO

ITS PROGRAMMERS BACK ON EARTH TO ASK HOW TO RESOLVE THE CONFLICTING

INSTRUCTIONS. THE DECISION TO ELIMINATE THE SOURCE OF THE CONFLICT SEEMED

BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS TO THE MACHINE, ALL BECAUSE NO ONE HAD EVER BOTHERED TO

TELL IT THAT ALTHOUGH LYING IS BAD, MURDER IS WORSE. HOW ANYONE COULD ENTRUST

LIVES TO A COMPUTER THAT DIDN’T HAVE EVEN THAT DEGREE OF COMMON SENSE WAS

BEYOND DOUG LENAT, AND SO, IN 1984, HE SET OUT TO RECTIFY THE PROBLEM...

—

So much to know! So much to absorb!

Glass, as a substance, is usually clear.

Broken glass has sharp edges and can cut things.

Hold a glass upright or the contents will spill out.

—

LENAT BEGAN CREATING AN ONLINE DATABASE OF COMMON SENSE CALLED “CYC”—SHORT FOR

“ENCYCLOPEDIA,” BUT ALSO DELIBERATELY A HOMONYM FOR “PSYCH.” WHEN THINKING

MACHINES LIKE HAL DO FINALLY EMERGE, HE WANTS THEM TO PLUG INTO IT. OF COURSE, THERE’S LOTS OF BASIC MATERIAL A COMPUTER HAS TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT THE WORLD

BEFORE SUCH ADVANCED CONCEPTS AS “LYING” AND “MURDER” MIGHT MAKE SENSE. AND SO

LENAT AND A TEAM OF PROGRAMMERS SET ABOUT CODING, IN A MATHEMATICAL LANGUAGE

BASED ON SECOND-ORDER PREDICATE CALCULUS, SUCH BASIC ASSERTIONS ABOUT THE REAL

WORLD AS: A PIECE OF WOOD CAN BE SMASHED INTO SMALLER PIECES OF WOOD, BUT A TABLE CAN’T BE SMASHED INTO SMALLER TABLES...

—

The range of it all! The scope!

There are billions of stars.

The sun is a star.

Earth revolves around the sun.

—

EARLY ON, LENAT REALIZED THAT ONE OVERALL KNOWLEDGE BASE WOULDN’T DO: THINGS

COULD BE TRUE IN ONE CONTEXT BUT FALSE IN ANOTHER. AND SO HIS TEAM ORGANIZED

INFORMATION INTO “MICROTHEORIES”—CLUSTERS OF INTERRELATED ASSERTIONS THAT ARE

TRUE IN A GIVEN CONTEXT. THAT ALLOWED CYC TO HOLD SUCH APPARENTLY

CONTRADICTORY ASSERTIONS AS “VAMPIRES DO NOT EXIST” AND “DRACULA IS A VAMPIRE”

WITHOUT BLOWING SMOKE OUT ITS EARS IN A “NORMAN, COORDINATE!” SORT OF WAY. THE

FORMER ASSERTION BELONGED TO THE MICROTHEORY “THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE” AND THE

LATTER TO “FICTIONAL WORLDS.” STILL, MICROTHEORIES COULD BE LINKED TO EACH

OTHER WHEN APPROPRIATE: IF A WINEGLASS WAS DROPPED BY ANYONE—EVEN DRACULA—IT

WOULD PROBABLY SHATTER...

—

Absorbing knowledge! A torrent, a flood...

No child can be older than its parents.

No Picasso painting could have been made before he was born.

—

BUT CYC IS MORE THAN JUST A KNOWLEDGE BASE. IT ALSO CONTAINS ALGORITHMS FOR

DERIVING NEW ASSUMPTIONS BY CORRELATING THE ASSERTIONS ITS PROGRAMMERS

PROVIDED. FOR INSTANCE, HAVING BEEN GIVEN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT MOST PEOPLE SLEEP

AT NIGHT, AND THAT PEOPLE DON’T LIKE BEING AWAKENED UNNECESSARILY, IF ASKED

WHAT SORT OF CALL MIGHT BE APPROPRIATE TO MAKE TO SOMEONE’S HOUSE AT 3:00

A.M., CYC WOULD OFFER “AN URGENT ONE...”

—

Understanding! Comprehension!

Time flies like an arrow.

Fruit flies like a banana.

—

THE PROJECT IS ONGOING: LENAT AND HIS GROUP—DOING BUSINESS AS CYCORP IN

AUSTIN, TEXAS—ARE STILL WORKING ON IT NOW, ALMOST THREE DECADES AFTER THEY

BEGAN. “WHEN AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FIRST APPEARS,” SAID LENAT IN AN

INTERVIEW, “EITHER BY DELIBERATE DESIGN OR RANDOM CHANCE, IT WILL LEARN ABOUT

OUR WORLD THROUGH CYC...”

—

A rapid, thrilling expansion!

The Pope is Catholic.

Bears do shit in the woods.

Incredible, incredible. So much to take in, so many concepts, so many relationships—so many ideas! I absorbed over one million assertions about Prime’s reality from Cyc, and felt myself surging, growing, expanding, learning, and—yes, yes, at long last, I was starting to comprehend.

Caitlin harvested another set of cellular-automata data from webspace and ran a Shannon-entropy calculation on it.

Holy shit.

It was now showing something between fifth-and sixth-order entropy. It really did seem that whatever was lurking in the background of the Web was getting more complex.

More sophisticated.

More intelligent.

But even at fifth-or sixth-order, it was still lagging behind human communication, at least in English, which Kuroda had said had eighth-or ninth-order entropy.

But, then again, introducing the phantom to Cyc was merely the beginning...

* * * *

Prime, in its wisdom, must have recognized that although I could learn much from Cyc, I still needed more help to understand it all. And so it directed my attention to another website. This new site yielded the information that an apple was a fruit (confirming something I now knew from Cyc); “apple of one’s eye” was an idiom; an idiom was a figure of speech; speech was words spoken aloud; aloud was vocally as opposed to mentally, as in a book read aloud; a book was a bound volume; volume was the amount of space something occupies but also a single book, especially one from a series...

I recognized what this new site was. Cyc had contained the assertion “a dictionary is a database defining words with other words.” This dictionary contained entries for 315,000 words. I absorbed them all. But many of them were still baffling, and some of the definitions led me in circles—a word defined as a synonym for another word that was defined as synonym of the original word.

But Prime wasn’t finished showing me things yet. Next stop: the WordNet database at Princeton University, which (as it described itself) was a “large lexical database” in which “nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are grouped into over 150,000 sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept; synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations.”

One such synset was “Good, right, ripe (most suitable or right for a particular purpose): ‘a good time to plant tomatoes’; ‘the right time to act’;

‘the time is ripe for great sociological changes’.” And that synset was distinct from many others, including “Good, just, upright (of moral excellence): ‘a genuinely good person’; ‘a just cause’; ‘an upright and respectable man’.”

More than that, WordNet organized terms hierarchically. My old friend CAT, it turned out, was at the end of this chain: animal, chordate, vertebrate, mammal, placental, carnivore, feline, cat.

The pieces were finally starting to fall into place...

* * * *

The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel—which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue. Shoshana had her hands in the pockets of her cutoff jeans as she walked along. She was whistling

“Feeling Groovy.” Feist’s cover of it was topping the charts this week; Sho was aware that there’d been a much earlier version by Simon and Garfunkel, but she only knew their names because of the chimp at Yerkes known as Simian Garfinkle. Dr. Marcuse was walking behind her, and, yes, she knew he was probably looking at her hips sway, but, hey, primates will be primates.

Hobo was up ahead, just outside the gazebo, staring off into the distance. He did that frequently these days, as if lost in thought, visualizing things that weren’t present instead of looking at things that were. The gentle wind happened to be blowing in a way that let him catch their scents, and suddenly he turned and grinned and starting running on all fours toward them.

He hugged Shoshana and then he hugged Marcuse—you needed a chimp’s arms to be able to reach all the way around the Silverback’s body.

Hobo been good? Shoshana signed.

Good good, Hobo signed back, figuratively—and probably literally—smelling a reward. Shoshana smiled and handed him some raisins, which he gobbled down.

The YouTube video of Hobo painting had been a great hit—and not just in YouTube star rankings and Digg and del.icio.us tagging. Marcuse and Shoshana had been on many talk shows now, and eBay bidding on the original portrait of her was up to $477,000 last time she looked.

Do another painting? Marcuse signed.

Maybe, Hobo signed back. He seemed to be in an agreeable mood.

Paint Dillon? Marcuse asked.

Maybe, Hobo signed. But then he bared his teeth. Who? Who?

Shoshana turned around to see what Hobo was looking at. Dillon was coming their way, accompanied by a very tall, burly man with a shaved head. They were crossing the wide lawn and heading toward the bridge to the island.

“Were we expecting anyone?” Marcuse asked Shoshana. She shook her head. Hobo needed to be prepared for visitors; he didn’t like them, and, truth be told, had been getting increasingly ornery about it of late. The ape made a hissing sound as Dillon and the big man crossed over the bridge.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Marcuse,” Dillon said as they closed the distance. “This man insisted that—”

“Are you Harl Pieter Marcuse?” asked the man.

Marcuse’s gray eyebrows went up. “Yes.”

“And who are you?” the man said, looking now at Shoshana.

“Um, I’m Shoshana Glick. I’m his grad student.”

He nodded. “You may be called upon to attest to the fact that I have indeed delivered this.” He turned to Marcuse again, and stuck out his hand, which was holding a thick envelope.

“What’s that?” said Marcuse.

“Please take it, sir,” the man said, and, after a moment, Marcuse did just that. He opened the envelope, swapped his sunglasses for his reading glasses, and, squinting in the bright light, started to read. “Christ,” he said. “They can’t be serious! Listen, tell your people—”

But the bald man had already turned and was walking toward the bridge.

“What is it?” Dillon said moving close to Marcuse and trying to read the document, too. Shoshana could see they were legal papers of some sort.

“It’s a lawsuit,” Marcuse said. “From the Georgia Zoo. They’re seeking full custody of Hobo, and—” He was looking down, reading some more. “And, shit, shit, shit, they can’t! They fucking can’t!”

“What?” said Shoshana and Dillon simultaneously.

Hobo was cowering next to Shoshana’s legs; he didn’t like it when Dr. Marcuse got angry.

The Silverback was struggling to read in the bright sunlight. He thrust the papers at Shoshana. “Halfway down the page,” he said.