Advertisement
Not a member of Pastebin yet?
Sign Up,
it unlocks many cool features!
- At the center of the universe is a horribly wounded angel.
- Its wings are torn and blackened, its skin plastered with a dull purple
- blood that never seems to grow totally dry. It is disfigured, mangled,
- covered in seared, faintly glowing cracks. The face is fixed in an
- eternal, unchanging expression of pure, limitless joy. The eyes are empty
- sockets. The arms are eternally outstretched, because they are tied in
- place.
- It is nothing anyone would call conscious, and is only in the barest,
- barest sense of the word still alive. If anything resembling awareness
- remains, that awareness consists of nothing but an infinite field of
- gridded black and white squares, a test pattern scattered with dancing
- dots that shift and jump and blur into one another. It would be tempting
- to say this is consciousness, but in fact the angel is not aware of the
- test pattern. It simply is.
- This test pattern is useful.
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Records as to the details that begin this story are not available, and it
- is clear they have been made that way on purpose. What knowledge can be
- gained-- and it is available to precious, precious few-- consists mostly
- of assumptions. The assumption is that angels exist. The assumption is
- that they are, in fact, perfect, or a reflection or aspect or agent of
- some perfect higher being. The assumption is that from time to time,
- perhaps as their sole function, these angels are sent out on missions, to
- perform the will of their creator. The most immediate assumption one comes
- to is that whatever such tasks could conceivably be, it is possible for
- them to fail.
- The one certainty is that at some point, some ship in the employ of the
- Altran Corporation-- possibly a pathfinder, possibly a minor delivery ship
- of some sort, possibly an aggressor, possibly merely a communications
- satellite identifying a piece of space junk coming within a certain
- radius-- came into contact with an actual, real, unquestionable angel,
- floating in the dead, frozen vacuum of deep space. The assumption is that
- the angel had been sent up against something very, very dangerous. The
- assumption is that the angel had emerged victorious, as something that
- powerful would certainly have threatened humanity if left unchecked. The
- certainty is that the angel never made it back.
- After the point at which the angel was retrieved, by whatever means this
- was done, records began to be kept. Engineers at the greatest level of
- confidence within Altran were secretly summoned to a highly guarded
- location, to experiment on what had been found. And they did. Extensively.
- The initial results held no particular meaning. The flesh was in fact
- definitely alive, and was in fact definitely not any known sort of
- organism, but could not be induced to heal, react, or do anything
- interesting. What was left retained the power to hold itself together, but
- little more, and crumbled under pressure. Volumes of data were produced
- during this process. By and large, this data was never used.
- In the end the only thing that could be induced to any activity whatsoever
- was the brain, the last thing to be worked on in detail. And there the
- last remaining spark of autistic half-life in the creature was found. The
- engineers carefully cut apart the crushed skull and plowed and cajoled
- their way in at the molecular level with wires and sensors and probes,
- pushing past layer upon layer of brain matter that all were black and
- decayed and clearly dead and liquified upon being disturbed, and took
- exquisite care to preserve perfectly anything that proved an exception.
- And in the end, when finally a clear outline of what bits were still
- living had been formed-- a solid and almost warm block at what in a human
- would have been the reptilian core, a few island-like clumps of living
- matter scattered throughout, and microscopic chains of neurons that
- branched off in a number of directions from that center linking it all--
- the engineers connected wires everywhere that wires could be connected to
- and sent out a single universal gentle, quiet electric pulse, an attempt,
- in their way, to say hello.
- And the angel sent a pulse back.
- There was to be no communication. Too much of the brain was dead; the
- angel was already gone. The engineers found they could send information in
- certain ways and the brain would react, but the reaction was more
- mechanical than it was thought. Merely stimulus and response.
- With time, and through processes too complex to even begin to attempt to
- explain here, the engineers formed a clear map of all of the angel's mind
- that was left. Some fragments of problem solving, memory, visualization
- remained. They could not get it to answer direct questions. What they did
- discover was that it perhaps had not utterly died, but merely in some way
- regressed. They discovered they could get it to respond; discovered they
- could not harness the mechanics directly, but they could interact with it.
- They could compose a simulacrum of thoughts and get real thoughts back.
- The thoughts they could use to interact in this way were extremely simple,
- and the level of interaction was roughly that one might have with a
- mentally impaired child one is taking care of.
- And in a small bit of sweet, strange childlikeness, the most complicated
- thing they were able to get what remained of the angel's mind to do, after
- year after year of attempts, was play the old Japanese game of Go. They
- could form thoughts which coaxed into being in what remained of the
- angel's imagination a Go board, coaxed into what remained of its
- understanding the rules. They could form thoughts that described their
- moves. The angel, with the distant and inexplicable glow that remained at
- the center of its skull, moved in return. That was all.
- The angel remains there still, eyes empty, its half-open smile of
- unconditional love still uncollapsed, its burnt and blackened in places
- but otherwise still almost glowing golden hair still trying to escape out
- in a wizened mane, pushing out the back of the equipment, intertwined with
- the hundreds or millions of metal pipes and wires, some visible, some not,
- that quietly encase all that remains of the angel's brain and flow out,
- back, spiraling off in thousands of different directions to the layer upon
- layer of machinery that entomb the angel on every side. The outpost in
- which all this is kept does not have a name, because it is not spoken of.
- It is too great a secret.
- One of the problems with computing, despite paradigm shifts and
- advancements over time that one supposes must be literally beyond the
- imagining of those who worked on the art in its early days, is that there
- are certain problems that never get any easier. These problems, the
- so-called NP-hard, drive computer scientists batty because they are so
- universal, so basic, and yet still so inaccessible. They occur essentially
- every time there is a large system of decisions in which every decision
- effects the outcome of every other. Perhaps the most basic version of an
- NP-hard problem is this: You have a series of arbitrary locations
- connected by a series of arbitrary roads, and each road takes a specific
- known amount of time to traverse. You want to know what would be the
- quickest route that visits every location on your list. On a small scale,
- perhaps a map on a piece of paper, this is something a human mind can
- figure out with a fair degree of ease. Computer scientists are not
- interested in small scales. Most of them, especially these days, are
- interested in only one thing: as the scale becomes larger, how much harder
- does the problem become?
- And the problem with the NP-hard questions is that their complexity
- increases exponentially; the amount of time it takes to solve such a
- problem doubles, or more, with each added decision. We can readily handle
- this doubling up to a point, but then we quickly reach something where our
- ability to compute appears more and more futile with each added simple
- step. Since this issue first appeared some very surprising methods of
- dealing with this kind of problem, and some very surprising and ingenious
- specialized devices, have been created, but still, at a certain scale, the
- difficulty of that simple traveling salesman problem-- when applied to the
- question of, say, how to effectively route all the messages within a
- galaxy-wide telecommunications network-- becomes daunting. When it comes
- to something like modeling the gravitational interactions of the particles
- within a decent-sized quasar, it reaches the point where one begins to use
- words like "impossibility" and seriously mean it. Advances in technology
- since the day of the transistor have not helped the problem one bit. All
- that we have been able to do is take the the point at which the problem
- becomes unbearable and push it back a relatively infinitesimal amount;
- past that point there is still nothing that can be done. It is like the
- old proverb of the man who invented Chess, and when asked by the Emperor
- what gift he wanted, he asked for one grain of rice for the first square,
- two grains of rice for the second, four grains of rice for the third; we
- can fulfill a decent portion of the chessboard easily, but just to fill
- that last square we could convert every molecule in the universe to
- silicon and have each crunch numbers until they all break, and still be
- nowhere near to solving one of a number of problems that scientists would
- like the answer to today.
- Here is the truly maddening thing about the NP-hard problems: if someone,
- anyone, could find one really ingenious way of solving an NP-hard
- problem-- any of them-- where the difficulty with scale became more
- complicated just polynomially, rather than exponentially, then they could
- all be solved that way. (One of the oldest unanswered questions in
- computer science is whether such a thing is possible.) That is to say,
- every class of NP-hard questions corresponds perfectly with every other
- class of NP-hard questions, in a sort of shadowy, behind-the-mathematics
- sort of way, and you can mechanically translate between any two relatively
- easily. Solve one, it happens, and you've solved them all.
- This is not an exact description of what happened. It is, however,
- something very similar. The essence is this: there exist homomorphisms by
- which any decision can be described perfectly as a scenario in Go.
- With the size of civilized space, and the extreme density of the various
- markets contained therein, running a fair-sized business venture has
- become a very difficult thing. There are so many things happening on every
- side, so many things to keep track of, so many different ways to move, and
- each interacts in so many, tiny, hard to remember ways. It is much like
- Go, but there is many, many times more information, and many, many times
- more decisions to make, than could be made even to fit within the 3361
- possible configurations of a 19x19 board. It is more than can be kept
- within the mind of a single human. It is often more than can be
- coordinated within a single organization without the difficulty of
- effective communication between the disparate points making everything
- break down. When you get into the question of running something like one
- of the corporations the size of Altran, an entity so large, varied and
- powerful that there are places where it can hardly be described as
- anything other than a nation-state, efficient decisionmaking begins to
- seem so complex one can begin to use words like "impossible" and mean it.
- But here is the thing: while decisions of these scales are beyond our
- ability to solve well by any knowledge or art or technology we possess, we
- do begin to find that we have the technology to, with great effectiveness,
- describe the context for these decisions down to the minutest detail. We
- can master the question. We just have no way to move forward into an
- answer. But while we cannot answer such questions ourselves, we can
- rephrase them, analyze them shallowly, shuffle observations around on
- paper. And one of the things we can rephrase them as is Go.
- And so there is a mindless, childlike angel at the heart of the galaxy
- that eternally, joyfully, plays an endless game of Go. The damage to its
- physical form has made its mind simple, simplified more than we-- not
- knowing what that mind was capable of when it was at its full abilities--
- can imagine. But it remains an angel's mind. Simplified though it is, it
- is still infinite. It is still perfect. And it plays the perfect game of
- Go. It is beyond the rules of our universe, beyond the boundaries of
- finiteness, beyond the NP-complete requirement that some things just get
- exponentially harder as they get more complicated. And in its mind, still
- unblemished somehow, is an infinite Go board, in which a number of dancing
- white stones larger than one can even really imagine are day in and day
- out besieged by black stones carefully placed into the angel's mind by a
- truly staggering volume of computer equipment. And through this
- unimaginable amount of space, day in, day out (a mammoth frothing tangle
- of white and black in a seemingly infinite glob at the center, an almost
- countless number of tiny islands of war scattered out throughout infinity,
- and for each a real or potential quiet chain of go attacks stretching out
- toward infinity to connect them all) the white stones are always winning.
- The placers of the black stones do not mind, as this is by their design.
- Their intent within the game is not to win. The black stones are being
- placed by a massive computer network whose purpose is known only to
- precious few, a network that gathers every single decision, every bit of
- information, every scenario, every question facing the Altran corporation
- at that moment in time, laboriously converts the entire state of the
- universe from the perspective of Altran into configurations of stones on
- the Go board, and laboriously translates the angel's move back into the
- answer, the move, the best possible strategic decision for that moment in
- time. These homomorphisms are quite nasty, and abstraction is limited.
- Describing a set of decisions that varied and that large into something as
- simple as stone patterns within Go is not simple, and the amount of board
- space required to describe the system compounds upon itself with each
- added question that is a part of it. That does not matter. There is room.
- The staggering success of the Altran Corporation has been a surprise to
- very many, and it has been attributed to a number of things. The most
- common belief is that their success is due to the complex, baffling, and
- shifting set of unethical or semiethical anticompetitive tactics that they
- undertake on a constant basis. This is partially right, but the tactics
- are only a tool. The real reason for Altran's success is simply and
- literally this: that at each moment, in every way, for its goals, Altran
- makes literally the best possible decision it could make given the
- information available to it.
- There is one thing that leads me to believe the Altran Corporation's
- success will not be limitless. It is that despite all the technology,
- despite its perfect decisions, the ability of Altran to gather an accurate
- portrait of the information describing its universe, and the ability of
- Altran to model that information in an accurate way, is still imperfect
- and human. The knowledge of this fact comprises my one and sole remaining
- fragment of hope.
- -mmc (off Kuro5hin.org)
Advertisement
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment
Advertisement