“He’ll get them, just take him shopping after school,” Paddy said, grunting as he bent to tie his shoes. “Anyway, clothes aren’t any kind of real present for a boy. Especially on an occasion like this. He’s finished high school in less than a year and is looking forward to the university. And he’s only twelve years old.”
“Have you ever thought that we are pushing him too fast?”
“Dolly — you know better than to say a thing like that. There’s no pushing here. If anything we have to work hard not to hold him back. It was his idea to finish high school so quickly because there are courses he wants to take that aren’t available in secondary education. That’s why he wants to see where I work. The security regulations prevented him coming until now. So this is a very exciting moment in his life because he now has all the grounding that he needs to go ahead. To him the university is the horn of plenty, bursting with good things to consume.”
“Well that’s all right. He really should eat more. He gets into that computer and forgets where he is.”
“A metaphor!” Paddy laughed. “Intellectual food to feed his curiosity.”
She was hurt, tried not to show it. “Now you’re laughing at me, just because I worry about his health.”
“I’m not laughing at you — and his health is fine. And his weight’s fine, he grows like a weed and swims and works out just like every other kid. But his intellectual curiosity — that’s what is different. You want to come with us? This is his big day.”
She shook her head. “It’s not for me. Just enjoy yourself and see that you are back by six. I’m making a turkey with all the trimmings and Milly and George are coming over later. I want to be cleaned up before they get here—”
The door crashed open and Brian thundered in.
“Aren’t you ready, Dad? Time to go.”
“Ready when you are.” Brian was at the front door, almost out of it; Paddy called after him. “And say good-bye to Dolly.”
“Bye,” and he was gone.
“An important day for him,” Paddy said.
“Important, of course,” Dolly said quietly to herself as the door closed. “And I’m just the housekeeper around here.”
The artificial island and attendant oil platforms were home to Brian now; he was no longer aware of this unusual environment. When it all had been new to him he used to explore the rigs, sneaking down the gangways to the bottom level with the sea surging around the steel legs below. Or up to the helipads, even climbing around a locked barrier once to clamber up the ladder to the communication mast on the administration building, the highest point in UFE. But his curiosity about these mechanical constructs had long since been satisfied; he had much more important and interesting things to think about now as they walked across the bridge mat led to the lab rig.
“All the electronic laboratories are here,” Paddy explained. “That’s our generator over there, the dome, since we need a clean and stable power supply.”
“Pressurized water reactor from the submarine Sailfish. Junked in 1994 when the global agreement was signed.”
“That’s the one. We go in here, second floor.”
Brian stared about in silence, tense with excitement. It was Saturday so they had the place entirely to themselves. Though an occasional sudden humming of drives and a glowing screen showed that at least one background program had been left running.
“Here is where I work,” Paddy said, pointing to the terminal. A charred briar pipe was resting on top of the keyboard and he removed it before he pulled the chair out for Brian. “Sit down and hit any key to turn it on. I tell you I’m proud of this yoke, the new zed seventy-seven. It gives you an idea of the kind of work we’re doing if they pop for something like mis. Makes a Cray look like a beat-up Macintosh.”
“Really?” Brian’s eyes were wide as he ran his fingers along the edge of the keyboard.
“Well, not really.” Paddy smiled as he rooted in his pocket for his tobacco. “But it is faster in certain kinds of calculation and I really need it for the development work on LAMA. That’s a new language that we are developing here.”
“What’s it for?”
“A new, rapidly developing and special need. You write programs in LOGO, don’t you?”
“Sure. And BASIC and FORTRAN — and I’m learning E out of a book. My teaching has been telling me something about Expert Systems.”
“Then you will already know that different computer languages are used for different purposes. BASIC is a good first hands-on language for learning some of the simplest things computers can do — for describing procedures, step by step. FORTRAN has been used for fifty years because it is especially good for routine scientific calculations, though it now has been replaced by formula-understanding Symbolic Manipulation systems. LOGO is for beginners, particularly children, it is so graphical, making it easy to draw pictures.”
“And it lets you write programs that write and run other programs. The others don’t let you do that. They just complain when you try.”
“You’ll discover that you can do that in LAMA, too. Because, like LOGO, it is based on the old language LISP. One of the oldest and still one of the best — because it is simple and yet can refer back to itself. Most of the first expert programs, in the early days of artificial intelligence, were developed by using the LISP language. But the new kinds of parallel processing in modern AI research need a different approach — and language — to do all those things and more. That’s LAMA.”
“Why is it named for an animal?”
“It isn’t. LAMA is an acronym for Language for Logic and Metaphor. It is partially based on the CYC program developed in the 1980s. To understand artificial intelligence it is first vital that we understand our own intelligence.”
“But if the brain is a computer, what is the mind? How are they connected?”
Paddy smiled. “A question that appears to be a complete mystery to most people, including some of the best scientists. Yet as far as I can see it’s really no problem at all, just a wrong question. We shouldn’t think of the mind and brain as two different things that have to be connected, since they are just two different ways of looking at the same thing. Minds are simply what brains do.”
“How does our brain computer compute thoughts?”
“No one really knows exactly — but we have a pretty good idea. It isn’t really just one big computer. It’s made of millions of little bunches of interconnected nerve cells. Like a society. Each bunch of cells acts like a little agent that has learned to do some little job — either by itself or by knowing how to get some other agents to help. Thinking is the result of all those agents being connected in ways that make them help each other — or to get out of the way when they cannot help. So even though each one can do very little, each one can still carry a little fragment of knowledge to share with the others.”
“So how does LAMA help them share?” Brian had listened with complete concentration, taking in every word, analyzing and understanding.
“It does this by combining an Expert System shell with a huge data base called CYC — for encyclopedia. All previous Expert Systems were based on highly specialized knowledge, but CYC provides LAMA with millions of fragments of common sense knowledge — the sorts of things that everyone knows.”
“But if it has so many knowledge fragments, how does LAMA know which ones to use?”
“By using special connection agents called nemes, which associate each knowledge fragment with certain others. So that if you tell LAMA that a certain drinking-cup is made of glass, then the nemes automatically make it assume that the cup also is fragile and transparent — unless there is contrary evidence. In other words, CYC provides LAMA with the millions of associations between ideas that are needed in order to think.”
When Paddy stopped talking to light his pipe the boy sat in silence for almost a minute.