Storytime

Science Fiction Prototyping

pontiff — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:04:53 +0000

Science Fiction Prototyping

Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write--always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a "consumer experience architect" in the Digital Home - User Experience Group at Intel. Okay that is a bit odd for a typical seminar speaker, but still lies in the "reasonable" range. And then you find out the title of his talks is "Brain Machines: Robots, Free Will and Fictional Prototyping as a Tool for AI Design" and you say, whah? Which is exactly what a group of about forty of us said upon hearing about this seminar, and is exactly why we showed up to hear the talk!

In his day job BDJ (sorry with a name that long, it gets turned into a TLA) is involved in television. That sounds kind of odd, but a company like Intel, which is constantly looking 5 to 10 years out in designing its new chips, has to be ready to supply the computing power in the proper form that is going to be relevant to the future of the company. Thus it would make sense that Intel should care about where technology is going, and why it is going that way. In particular this involves a lot of trying to understand how we incorporate technology into our lives. So yeah, dude's got a cool job where he gets to think about where technology is going and how consumers use technology. But that's not really what the talk was about.

What the talk was really about was an intriguing idea: is it possible to use science fiction to aid in creation of commercial products and research opportunities? Now that's a crazy idea. Here is a chunk of an abstract on the subject:

How can science fiction help prototype emerging science theory and experimentation? Expanding on the framework of consumer experience architecture, this talk explores how a fictional story, based specifically on current works of scientific research, can lead to the expansion and further experimentation of a dramatic new approach to artificial intelligence and domestic robots.

On a first reflection you could color me skeptic on this idea. I mean, sure, many scientists were influenced by reading science fiction at a young age (one need look no further than this to explain the many amusing personality traits of your scientist friends.) And yeah, sure, there are cases in which science fiction presages technical breakthroughs (step forth Greg Egan, and accept an award for a novel about quantum computers speeding up calculations in 1992!) Indeed, the hard nosed scientist in me (and probably the scientists in many who listened to the talk), says, this is kind of crazy, how could writing a science fiction story help in advancing science or technology?

And then, of course, the literature major in me kicks in (yeehaw!), and I think about why I like fiction. The best fiction in some manner transports your thought process into a new setting. A story can test what it would feel like if the world worked in a certain way, and, if it is good fiction, does so in a way that connects with your model of the world. This is true not just of science fiction, which tends to a cartoonish technologically heavy version of projection, but of all sorts of other fiction, where the new space explored tends to involve such things as love, hate, death, and the long list of subjects that lie at the heart of our lives. And thus, I would say, the idea that stories can help shape your research isn't all that crazy: the creative act of telling a story shares many similarities with the creative act of developing a new research idea or inventing a new technology. In particular I would point out that in both processes you need to make sure that you maintain a connection to reality in your speculation (for stories your must connect with a reader and in science you must not go against the constraints of what experiments have taught you.)

Indeed in reflecting more about this, I thought, "welI I know at least one researcher who I secretly suspect actually operates this way!" And then I realized, that, oops I know another, albeit less successful dude: The Equilibrium Theory of Games and The Library of Laplace are two short blog stories I wrote which, in some ways, are science fiction prototypes for research projects. Indeed the later is related to ideas I have explicitly tried to work on for years, but have never achieved any success in hashing this into a "real" research result. So I am not a successful science fiction prototyper, but at least I've experienced this idea up close.

Which brings me to the final point: should we be doing science fiction prototyping? Can taking current research and attempting to project it onto stories help us understand the next step in research? Can find we new technologies by writing "Do iPhones Dream of Electric People?" Well, I don't think we can answer that until we give it a try, and I'm particularly intrigued by the idea because thinking of good new creative ideas is extraordinarily difficult (at least for me!) And, of course, as an occupation, science fiction prototyper sounds like an awesome job. So if there is any company out there interested in hiring a science fiction prototyper, please consider my application submitted.

pontiff Wed, 11/18/2009 - 07:04

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Doesn't SF give a feel for how tech would be used. Think of Blade Runner Decades ago using a zoom in/zoom out for playing around with video. Play with Google Maps pictures and we are right there. (Absent the infinite sharpness) Think of Shockwave Rider by John Brunner with its worms and security attacks. All from the '70's.

I am not sure that anything would not have been done, but it doesn't hurt to have something concrete like that in mind when you are designing something. That I think is where it helps. to give an idea of what it would be like personally. If you were using that tech, what would it feel like.

Yes, there are hits in the record. Adding to Markk's list:

Star Trek (original) gave us 3 1/2 inch floppy disks and flip-phones. But only as use-cases. But it did not (yet) give us talking computers that explode when presented with Godelian assertions of the form "this is not a true statement". There was no 'science' in the SF of Star Trek, but there were enough monkeys pounding the keys to get some things close enough to reality that later its fans were able to make them for real.

Then there were A. C. Clarke's stories about geo-centric communications satellites (IIRC, based on a non-fiction paper he wrote around 1945). But in this case there was some science: the orbital math was right, just no then extant way to get the satellites up there. And then again, he was not alone, the idea was already "in the air" and had been since at least 1925.

But there is lately somewhat of a confirmation bias about the success stories from SF. They are not as numerous as is wanted to be believed. Even the big hits - Star Trek, Blade Runner, etc - have mostly unreal ideas.

But I will take issue on one little point: you must have had a very narrow exposure to SF to make the statements "science fiction, which tends to a cartoonish technologically heavy version of projection" and "other fiction, where the new space explored tends to involve such things as love, hate, death, and the long list of subjects that lie at the heart of our lives". Yes, Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) holds in SF as much as anywhere else, including mainstream fiction, but that last 10% does indeed exist. Sorry you missed out. Try Ursula K. LeGuin's books, or more recently Judy Czernada. The best SF stories are just like the best mainstream stories, but with the twist that the conundrums faced by the protagonists have a speculative basis in as-yet unrealized science, and where that science has at most one speculation but the rest is based on known results. It does exist, it is tougher to write because of the tech constraints. And it may also be that the writers and audience for SF are tending into ASD a little, rendering our inner experience of SF somewhat different to that of a normal.

To finish, I think the idea of SF Prototyping could be better expressed in the form of presenting use cases of an idea in the context of a fiction story in which the technology plays a role. I think it might be mostly fruitless to mine SF for tech ideas since there is no search algorithm by which to recognize the ones with real value as distinct from all the rest of the flights of pure fancy. Start with the idea and candy-wrap it, don't start with the candy-wrapping and hope there's a useful kernel inside.

Hey I did say "tend"!!!

Yeaaaah. If somebody at intel had had that kind of predictive power (5 to 10 years!), they (the giant that they are) would easily have beaten the iPod and the Kindle the tivo and what have you to the market.

I'm not so sure Greg Egan wants an award for Quarantine.

I thought Quarantine was an utterly hilarious satire of the Copenhagen Interpretation, in the vein of Stanislaw Lem's more fantastical excursions.

So I looked online, and found that everyone seemed think it was supposed to be a serious take on the implications of quantum theory.

Then I thought, "How can such brilliantly conceived and executed comedy be sailing over everyone's head?"

So I looked at page that Blake links above.

Then I thought, "Crap."

(Thus I am now trapped in a coherent superposition of mental states, my two different selves now respectively believing and dismissing the notion that Rucker wrote Postsingular as a systematic p*ss-take on every one of the tropes of its genre, with a shout out to P.Z. Myers squid fetish thrown in for good measure.)

My only criticism is that authors can have considerable biases.

I like Larry Niven, and he was noted to be a Misogynist and Human Supremacist. So alot of his books are outdated.

See James Blish, "The Science in Science Fiction." Collected in The Tale That Wags The God. The science is perhaps dated (rather space-opera-ish as I recall), but the thinking is perhaps still of value.

@Koray -- "If somebody at intel had had that kind of predictive power (5 to 10 years!), they (the giant that they are) would easily have beaten the iPod and the Kindle the tivo and what have you to the market."

Koray - not fair! Intel has been a commercial superstar. Remember the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, Sperry, NCR, Honeywell, Apollo, Sun, Altair, Imsai, etc etc...) You are picking a select number of successes -- but ignoring the many more failures. (Tivo is a cool technology, but a commercial disaster. Kindle may/may not be a BetaMax). Only the Ipod stands out. And here the statistic is cool:

Since 12/31/82 (first year that apple went public):

Apple's compound annual rate of return: 16.22%
Intel's compound annual rate of return: 16.12%

Dave: I volunteer for your prototype team. I'll do the financial projections...so long as I get to play with the toys!

Rocky

Well, the government has reached out to science fiction writers before to help goose their thinking about the future, so I don't see why other sectors couldn't give it a shot.

U.S. Mission for Sci-Fi Writers: Imagine That, Novelists Plot the Future Of Homeland Security

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 22, 2009

The line between what's real and what's not is thin and shifting, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has decided to explore both sides. Boldly going where few government bureaucracies have gone before, the agency is enlisting the expertise of science fiction writers.

--SNIP--

I find that a lot of Robert Heinlein's books, though they are often quite fantastical when alien life is brought into the equation, are very firmly based in real math and physics. His books helped spur the hippie movement as well as NASA's MMUs, among many other things. He also had quite workable ideas relating to space suits, artificial gravity, long distance space travel, and mechanized suits, which are all just starting to be looked at in more than a theoretical sense.

(1) I coauthored, for pay, a decade ago, a book on how Science Fiction has influenced actual business. This was to have been published by the #1 Business book publisher in the USA, who listed it in their catalog. The coauthor went nuts, after our Caltech co-alum Dave Brin helpfully suggested that the guy should have a written contract with me, money stopped, book never appeared, though about 1/2 completed, long story.

(2) One of my mentors, Dr. Herman Kahn (ex-Caltech PhD postdoc, head of RAND, founder of Hudson Institute, highest score seen before or since on standard U.S. Milkitary IQ test) explicitly used Science Fiction in a big way in his monumental book The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, (ISBN 9780025604407): Herman Kahn, Anthony J. Wiener. He had a full-time employee who did little but read Science Fiction magazines and classify the ideas therein, Patrick Gunkel, with whom I've talked f2f.
http://ideonomy.mit.edu/

(3) I do a lot of refereed paper publishing and international conference speaking with a Full Professor of International Business and Economics, who also publishes Science Fiction.

Any questions?

That's a very small word for someone in a hurry. OK, got me.

@Gary Ha, no I deserve it. Also I knew I was provoking people when I wrote that sentence :)

@Dave - One of my marginal ASD issues is not knowing when my leg is being yanked. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad.

That said, it's a blast to have lived through those old sf fantasies and lasted long enough to see the beginning of the hockey stick their realizations is evoking. One's sense of time passing at my advancing age is not only flashing by - a month is a much smaller percentage of my lifetime now - but also the accelerating pace of change in the environment in which I live and work just makes a year seem so much further in the dim past. Sort of an analog of the expanding Universe in the context of subjective time.

Rocky,

The products I mentioned are brain dead straightforward ideas (mp3 players, e-book readers were already in the market BEFORE these products). Predictions accurate enough for 5-10 years ahead would let you see the real deals coming, let alone these pesky derivatives.

Intel indeed has been a commercial superstar. Not because of their vision. And not without evil.

About 1999 or 2000, I was contracted by the European Space Agency to research and write two articles for a series that looked to science fiction for ideas on the future of space exploration. My two topics were propulsion techniques and colonization techniques.

That was a really fun project (and they paid really well too).

The .pdf is here: http://www.esa.int/esapub/br/br176/br176.pdf

The backache is a pain or stiffness of the back. Pain in the inferior or average part is commonest to feel the back. In article findrxonline indicated The backaches are more common during the adolescence, but also the people of legal age suffer and who appear and disappear during periods of time.
The backaches can be caused by a pull in some of the 200 muscles of the back that allow us to maintain to us raised. The pull takes place when raising very heavy objects, when raising something from an uncomfortable position or when doing too much effort with muscles of the back. Most of the backaches the twist of a ligament or muscle can be caused by tension or.
The backache can be associated with:
â¢ Stiffness, creeps, loss of mobility in an arm or a leg
â¢ Pain Chest or difficulty to breathe
â¢ Increase of the intensity of the pain, although this with medicines
â¢ Difficulty to walk or to maintain the balance.

The best SF stories are just like the best mainstream stories, but with the twist that the conundrums faced by the protagonists have a speculative basis in as-yet unrealized science, and where that science has at most one speculation but the rest is based on known results.

Haha great story! Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work with the blog!

I do remember hearing on the history channel or something that the IBM guy who came up with cordless phones got a phone call during a Star Trek episode and would have to miss a portion of it and thus inspired him.

The Equilibrium Theory of Games

pontiff — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:09:20 +0000

The Equilibrium Theory of Games

The other day I ran into a good friend from Tlön, who told me the most fascinating story about his discovery of a new theory of games.

I owe my discovery of the nature of equilibrium in card games to an odd conjunction of mirrors and an encyclopedia. The mirror was in our library, and the encyclopedia was called Encyclopedia Equilibria (London, 1942, Enlarged ed. 1983). The mirror was an abomination, for in its reflection, one could see their opponents cards, and thus it led me to a crisis in belief. The encyclopedia, however, was even more of an anomaly, containing a fallaciously named article the "Foundations of an Economic Analysis of Games" whose contents we learned about while hearing the history of a visitor to our weekly card game.
We had gathered together for our weekly tribute to Bacchus, stealing ourselves away in the library in an grand attempt to free ourselves through the copious use of wine and madness. The game of choice was loosely poker, but in a desire to satiate our fierce intellect, variations of a suitably clever nature were de rigueur and widely worshiped. Tonight's game brought together the usual crowd, a former theoretical physicist turned new media mogul, a government employee who, though not Russian, had achieved the title of Tsar, myself, who you know quite well, an altruistic mechanic who spent his summers on the road fixing those who'd broken down on their summer jaunts, and a new player, a friend of the mogul, introducing himself only as a ferryman by the name of Doe.

As the night grew long and after a game involving a slight variation on Pineapple, we began to notice a trend that our visitor, who had kept quite to himself except for small gestures and smaller chat apparently designed to help him blend in, had won the vast majority of the games we had played. Now normally we might subscribe his success to the whims of Fortuna, and yet, we had played a number of games that the regulars had devised and had deeply analyzed over a series of years. Flying Nun Chuck, for example, was a game we had dreamed up under the influence of the flicker of a mute second rate Kung Fu movie on the television installed in the library wall. We, the four, had played the game thousands of times, and in secret all of us had calculated to serve depth the odds involved in the game. Yet the ferryman had cleaned up all five times we had played the game.

Our curiosity thus peaked, we inquired, softly, where the ferryman had learned to play cards in such a fine fashion. "School," was his reply, which he threw at us with a hint of puzzlement, as if everyone had learned such skills in this manner. A game of Lincoln later (which the ferryman won) we probed more about his school: was there a thriving culture of card playing at the school? "Well, in so much as we studied the classics and modern theory of cards, yes, there was such a culture. But enough about my classes, let us try a game of Lame Brain Pete. Do you know the rules?"

At which point the four regulars, who were all looking at vastly reduced stacks sitting beside nearly empty glasses of wine, gave each other the eye which only old friendship could comprehend, and I interjected "Why don't we take a break and try this new bottle of Montrachet 1975 that the mogul brought along out on the deck?"

Jackets donned we thus braved the gentle spring cool to step out onto the deck, the sparkling city holding our focus as we sipped a fine vintage. "You were very lucky, ferryman, to have taken classes about card games in school," said the mogul. "I myself learned way too much about Hamiltonian dynamics, which I have only sparse occasion to employ in my new media empire."

"But of course, in Ciao Chug this was the main point of life," the ferryman replied. "One can only come to know the mind of God through games of chance, you know."

A long pause later, "But of course, I'm now a heretic, having disavowed the great book. In truth, I am far fallen. I've not cracked open Equilibria for years."

Our puzzlement clearly plaster across our faces, the ferryman, seemed, for the first time, to notice that his opponents were actual people and stuttered, "But of course you know of the good book, don't you? The book which describes in detail how balance is achieved in God's great plan?" Flustered when we answered in the negative, "But there was a copy right here in your library!"

A few seconds later the ferryman reappeared surrounded by his condensed, now rapid, breath, with a finely bound volume of the reference mold. It was a book that I had never seen despite the claim that it was from my library. On the spine was a strangely calligraphic title, Encyclopedia Equilibria.

Thumbing through the volume with the mechanic and the Tsar perched on shoulder, the ferryman explained. "The Encyclopedia Equilibria contains the story of the discovery the idea of equilibrium. Through a series of rational arguments it shows how one can approach the one true point of balance in the universe. This is the doctrine of tatonnement, of a path to greater harmony and value in the world. If you live your life according to the ideas described in Equilibria, then all that causes trouble in your life will dissolve away and you will be at peace with the world."

"While I was in the monasterial academy of Ciao Chug, I took on a double major. On the one hand, I studied the theory of nonlinear dynamics, at the time a new and exciting field. But my other major was dedicated to a single chapter in Equilibra, 'Foundations of an Economic Analysis of Games.' This chapter, as you probably know, was subject to much debate in the theological analysis of Equilibria."

Again puzzled looks forced the ferryman onward. "You see this chapter showed how to apply the concepts of balance to games. This was, of course, a quite serious matter, since the entire monastery engaged each day in card games as a way to get closer to balance with the universe. The method to our play was dictated by our detailed analysis of the games. In these analysis, it was required that we apply a rational strategy. For each game we developed a complete set of strategies which everyone should employ. These strategies were our daily chants to get closer to God."

"My own studies were focused on a close reading of the 'Games' chapter of the good book. For most of my years at Ciao Chug, I was, I suppose, very content. All flowed in ways which only increased my own personal parsimony. I had analyzed Pineapple and found an even simpler method for explaining the rational strategy, and achieved a note of distinction among my peers."

"But a chance meeting soon changed my world. Late, one day, to the daily game of Hold'em, I stumbled upon the eldest brother of the monastery engaged in kissing a rather old statue located on the monastery grounds. Shocked at such a sight, I climbed up beside him and asked him what he was doing. `My mind. My mind. My mind,' was all he could reply. Bewildered and concerned for the elder, I ran to the gambling hall, summoning the other brothers, who quickly took the crazy elder away."

"A few weeks later, the crazy elder had returned to the fold. I watched him closely, of course, curious about the affliction which had caused his lunacy. I did not detect any hint of behavior beyond the norm, except for one small anomaly. As part of my major, I was required to keep track of the results of our daily games. Every week I tallied the games, check for balance by careful examination of the statistics of the results. These statistics had never, and still, even after the crazy elder's odd affair, never showed any deviation from those derivable from the good book. But I had been watching the elder, and it seemed to me that he was winning quite a large, but not extraordinarily large, number of the games. This observation piqued my curiosity and led me deep into the records of the individual brother's games, and a detailed analysis of the games of the crazy elder."

"And it was in this study that I discovered my own downfall. While the aggregate displayed no deviation from the good book, the crazy elder was winning much more than balance should dictate. How could this be? Well a doubt once hatched is nearly impossible to place in a cage, and so I began a detailed analysis of all brothers and their results in the past few years of game playing. And what did I discovered? That the elder was the only brother who deviated from the balance, sans one other brother. And that other brother was me."

"Shocked at this discovery I fled the monastery for the high hills of Uqbar. For days I fasted, and went over the rational arguments which had, for so long kept me in such great comfort. I wondered how it could be that I played the rational strategy, but was, somehow, the only one to come out with a worse result than every else. How was it that the crazy elder won? How was it that the total result of all of this was nil? I slept and thought, slept and thought, until one night, probably delirious, I awoke with the startling observation. Perhaps, there was no equilibrium theory of games. Perhaps it was possible to buck the balance by the use of irrational strategies. But if going out of balance could lead to more winning, then the book was wrong. The book was a but a panacea. This would, of course, explain why the crazy elder could do so well. That was the easy conclusion. But the idea that awoke me in shock, was my reason for why I was the one singled out to balance out the crazy elder. My conclusion: I was the only one playing the rational strategy which would lead to balance."

"It would have been natural for me, at that point, to flee Ciao Chug. But instead I did something rather devious. I resumed my life as normal with the exception that I no longer used the strategy devised from careful study of the book. Instead I began to experiment with radical new strategies for the card games. Quickly I found a strategy with which I began to win many more games than any other brother. Indeed it soon became apparent that this was so. Brothers began avoiding me and whispering behind my back. This all came to an explosive end, one night, when I did not lose a single game. I was summoned before the Council of Economic Policy and promptly excommunicated."

The night had drawn long and the tolerable spring cold had turn biting. "So this is how you were so consistently beating us?" asked the mechanic. "By using the strategies which you developed to beat the other brothers."

The ferryman, stood and stretched. He glanced dreamily toward the city lights below. He then slowly opened his jacket to reveal a handgun stashed in the inner pocket. "No," he said, "I beat you by reading your cards in the reflection of the television."

pontiff Tue, 05/12/2009 - 11:09

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Ski Lift Conversations

pontiff — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:47:31 +0000

Ski Lift Conversations

The man on the lift chair at Stephen's Pass asks me my occupation. Professor, I tell him, at the University of Washington.

Oh, he offers, My daughter is a fourth generation Husky. I was in the class of 1972. Or, well I would have been if I'd graduated, but I knew what I wanted to do didn't need a degree. If I'd wanted to work for IBM or Honeywell or something, then I guess it would matter.

Seattle, he continues scratching some snow from his mustache, used to be such a great city. But now, the traffic is crazy. My wife and I went on a trip and couldn't find a city more messed up than Seattle.

Interesting, I tell him, hoping that exactly my lack of interest might change the topic of conversation. So what do you do?

I'm retire now, but I used to be developer.

pontiff Fri, 02/22/2008 - 05:47

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Well, the CS curriculum of the sixties sucked. It was heavily weighed towards straight mathematics, and little about computers expect for Fortran programming which built keypunching skills more than algorithmic skills; Dijkstra was rarely mentioned as modular programming (new at the time) was taught more as an academic curiosity than a skill. Thus, it did not align well with business needs. Most programmers back then were actually EE majors, and, thus, really bad at software. (Their small is beautiful approach led to such great practices like not validating input parameters because they should just be passed correctly in the first place!)

It is much better today with teaching emerging languages, OOP, client-side technologies, and even IOC frameworks. It is much better aligned with business needs.

But now, the traffic is crazy. My wife and I went on a trip and couldn't find a city more messed up than Seattle.

Quite aside from the irony of a developer making this complaint, I doubt his traveling was all that extensive. Just considering cities I have visited in the last ten years, I'd say all of the following have worse traffic than Seattle: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston, London, Beijing, Munich. I'm sure there are many others, which I didn't list because I have not been there (or been lucky enough to avoid traffic problems there).

Disclaimer: I haven't been to the Eastside in a long time. Of course, this guy was probably one of the people responsible for making the Eastside what it is today.

How about Vancouver, BC?
Where did he travel - Boise?

Avoiding the Eastside is one of the great ways to love Seattle :)

He should have tried driving in New Delhi's traffic. He'd find cows, stray dogs, cycle rickshaws, autorickshaws, rickshaws that sold lemonade, bikers, two-wheelers of all kinds, crazy bus drivers, and all of this in hmmmm...120 F temperatures. Ahhh...I love the traffic in L.A. It is a joy and a pleasure to drive here. :)

The Library of Laplace

pontiff — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:39:01 +0000

The Library of Laplace

(With apologies to Jorge Luis Borges.)

The universe, which others call the cellular automata, is composed of an indefinite (and perhaps infinite) number of square rooms, each room having four doors (in what we can, for lack of a better choice, assumelie in the cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west.) Each door leads to an adjoining room which is identical to the other rooms except for one salient feature. In the middle of each room stands a monstrous monolith whose color is not fixed, but changes regularly every forty two seconds.

Like most inhabitants of the universe, I have often contemplated the mysterious workings of the monolith...

For many years, when heathens beat their chests and ran amok across the universe, it was thought that the colors and their changes were a sign sent from the heavens to signal to the inhabitants of the universe how they should live their lives. One cause of this unorder was that the color shadings of the monolith were subtle. Which is to say that one man's atrous was another man's melanic. Thus these olden days were filled with wars of epic proportions, where the meanings and differences between the colors caused the heathens to fight hand to hand across the halls of the universe.

The first discovery which brought civilization to the universe was the finding, by the autodidact Roy G. Biv, that the colors of the monoliths were not arbitrary. Biv, as his associates always called him, was playing one day with a piece of glass left over from the recently finished "Battle over Mauve." Curiously this piece of glass was of a shape which had been called "prism," a word whose origin has been lost to the ages of time but who some claim had mystical origins. Biv had been having some problems at home and had thus been outcast four rooms north and five rooms east of the room he inhabited with his wife and four children. In other words, he had some time on his hands. Biv noticed that by using some cardboard (also left around from the Battle) he could direct the light from the monolith into his prism shaped piece of glass. When he did this, to his amazement, a distinct line appeared on a part of his cardboard contraption, apparently emanating from his prism and of the same color as the monolith.

Curious, Biv scratched into the cardboard a line where the first color he saw had appeared as a line. Forty two seconds later, when a new color appeared, Biv excitedly noticed that the line for this new color did not appear in the same place as the former, but appeared in a slightly different location. Many hours later, Biv and his cardboard contraption had a large number of markings for different colors, but already Biv had seen the same line appear many times. There were many surprises in these lines. For example the colors aubergine and magenta, which a certain tribe five hundred rooms to the east swore were the same color, appeared with different lines! Thus this heresy for that tribe was something that did not need to be fought over, but could be resolved by using Biv's contraption. If the lines were different, the colors were different.

And thus began the age of monolith spectroscopy. For many years following Biv's discovery, Bivometers, contraptions like Biv's prism and cardboard construction, were invented, refined, and put to use in an ever widening circle of knowledge within the universe. Biv himself discovered that there were exactly 255 different lines which would appear in his Bivometer (which he never called a Bivometer, but instead called a triangular prism spectrometer.) I have traveled far and wide across the labyrinth of square rooms, taking my hand held Bivometer with me wherever I go, and have yet to observe a room in which exactly those 255 different lines did not appear. Indeed this has become a central dogma of the universe: that the monoliths can appear in only 255 colors, no more, no less, and these colors are the same in whichever direction you should choose to walk.

The age of monolith spectroscopy was marked by a sharp increase in the precision with which wars could be waged in the universe. Now instead of arguing over the colors of the monoliths, one could argue instead over what the monoliths were actually trying to say to the inhabitants of the universe. With great care careful observation of a room's monolith could be performed, and this record of colors could then be translated into a message from the deity which inhabited that monolith. But one man's cyan, cyan, fuscous, indigo, while being seen as the same colors by co-inhabitants of a room, would mean to one person that they should marry the neighbor to the north, and to another person it would mean exactly the opposite (that one should not marry to the neighbor to the south.) Long sequences of monolith colors, inspired great and bloody battles, epic poems, and many romantic love triangles. The age of monolith spectroscopy was the age of the song of the monolith colors.

For many years the age of monolith spectroscopy reigned and pressed its strange kind of order across the universe. But then a journeyman who made it his purpose to see as many rooms as he could in his lifetime passed through this very room and told my grandfather of a startling discovery made some five thousand rooms to the north and two thousand and fifty nine to the east of here. This journeyman, who went by the moniker Update, told my grandfather of a startling discovery of order in the universe. It had long been noted that the colors of monoliths in adjoining rooms changed at exactly the same time. By standing with your back to one of the monoliths one could look through the door to the adjoining room, place your hand in front of your face, and see the color from the monolith in your room reflected off your hand change at exactly the same time as the monolith in the adjoining room. This fact had long been noted, but little remembered.

But the journeyman told my grandfather that recently he was talking with an old gentleman who claimed that if one were to look not just through one door, but through each of the four doors, at the same time, one could, depending on the colors in those rooms, and the color of the monolith in your room, exactly predict the next color your monolith would be in the next time interval. Such heresy, my grandfather had never heard before in my life, and he covered his ears upon hearing it so as to not let more such visions of order enter into his head. That the color changes of a room's monolith depended only on the color of the monolith and the colors of the four adjoining room's monoliths? What madness! The number of ways that four rooms plus ones own room can each take on 255 colors is 255 x 255 x 255 x 255 x 255 = 1078203909375, a very large number. When one considers how long it would take for each of these different colors to appear, even assuming every combination where to appear once and exactly once, over a million years would be needed write down all of these combinations. How could anyone claim that there were rules such as those described governing the colors of the monoliths?

But like all madnesses, what one generation sees as absurd, the next sees as an opportunity. And thus my father, who had learned of this possible order in the universe from his father, took up this idea and began to ponder it more deeply. Having nowhere to start, he began by make a few tens of thousands of observations of the color changes, obtaining a huge catalog of six columned data. The first column contained the color of the monolith, the second through fifth column contained the color of the monolith to the north, east, west, and south, and the final column contained the color the monolith changed to under those previous five columns conditions. This list my father and his associates guarded as their secret treasure. Secret, for if the ruling faction of the local area of rooms ever found out about this list they might expel or even execute my father and his associates for heresy of the highest order.

For many years my father studied his lists. I remember fondly sitting beside him on the ground in the room in which I was born, watching him stare, deep in thought, at his laboriously constructed lists. And then, one day, my father disappeared. My suspicions were immediately for the local junta who were worshipers of the azul means war sect, and felt they had probably snatched him away and murdered him in a room not to far from my own. Adding to my suspicions just following my father's disappearance, a strange rumor began to spread. This rumor had to do with the way the colors changed in the rooms. In particular when one took a Bivometer the lines produced could be laid out in a line and onecould pick a dividing line between what one might call "top lines" and what one might call "bottom lines." The rumor was that if one looked at the colors of the four adjoining rooms and the color in your own room, if more top lines appeared in those five monoliths, then your monolith would change to one of the top lines. If more bottom lines appeared in those five monoliths, then a bottom line would appear. While one didn't know how to predict which bottom and which top line would appear, one could be certain that if the majority of colors you could see (including your own monolith) where top lines, in the next 42 second interval your own color would be a top line.

Upon hearing this idea, I immediately thought that my father, whose name was Toom, had probably been the source of this rumor. And because rumors can spread outside the grips of tyranny, it soon became known that this rule was in fact observed to be true! This discovery, of course, made me cry for my lost father, and rocked our understanding of the universe to its foundations. There was an order in the way in which the rules changed which had nothing to do with the desires of a deity, at least when it came to top and bottom lines, but instead was completely and totally determined by the monoliths color and the color of the monoliths in the adjoining rooms. News of this result spread out in a circle of knowledge from my local community and bounced back to us with news that indeed this observation holds true as far as the news has traveled.

Thus the secrets of the monoliths began to be unlocked, and a new generation, my generation, took hold of this idea and began to explore deeper and seriously the idea that the color changes of a monolith depend only on its own color and the color of its neighbors. Beyond the law which became known as Toom's rule, we soon began to unravel deeper and deeper order in the patterns of the color changes. Many revolutions later we know have a master rule, first written down by a good friend of mine known as Laplace--a rule which generates in a simple and elegant manner the answer to the question, "If the monolith in my room is color X and the adjoining rooms monoliths are N,E,W, and S, then the monolith in my room will change to color Y." These rules have never been found in error, except by charlatans who play tricks with colored paper to fool gamblers who should know better.

And thus the age of Laplace has begun. Since the monoliths have now yielded an order which is so profoundly simple, harmony has descended upon most rooms in the universe. Today inhabitants are soothed by the slow stead change of the predictable monoliths. All one needs to know is the color of your neighbors monolith and your own to feel you know what will happen in life. Life lived in forty two second intervals is as simple as equations plus some small observations.

But lately, at night, when I've covered my face in my bed to hide the monoliths glow, I wonder and I worry. I worry about that exact instance where the color of my monolith has changed, but the light from the adjoining rooms has not had time to get to my eye. In that instance, which I cannot observe, but I know must exist, I know the color of my monolith, but I do not know, I cannot know, the colors of the adjoining room's monolith. In that instant, I cannot predict how my monolith will change. Those with whom I've shared this nightmare simply glaze over and respond that such hypotheticals are the tools of evildoers who will wreck havoc on the order of the monoliths. And so I've kept this idea to myself and shared it with few. But at night, when others are asleep, my dreams are of that instant when I cannot predict the future, when the light from the adjoining room is old information, and the future is wonderfully, beautifully, undetermined.

pontiff Mon, 11/05/2007 - 10:39

Tags

Computer Science

Physics

Storytime

A delightful homage to Jorge Luis Borges, perhaps as combined with his fellow Argentine theorist Gregory Chaitin, and the biochemist, science writer, and science fiction author Isaac As-a-Mauve.

Its sounds like your people are living inside a computer monitor.

Most hilarious.

How do you, reader, know that you are not living inside of a computer? (Sorry that's a direct paraphrase of a classic line in Jorge Luis Borge's "The Library of Babel."

I thought the universe was a 2 (or maybe 2 1/2) dimensional collection of tetrahedra (something like a pile of four spheres)?

Also, we can't disprove that a hacker from CE 3001 built a sub-quantum computer simulation to preserve the universe digitally and then set the clock back to see if history would repeat itself.

As to speculations on how we might be software embedded in a computer which we believe is the universe, I'm deeply irked with the Cult of Nick Bostrom (which cult denies that I exist, and libels my coauthors with the easily refuted claim that they are my alises), and whose ringleader claims credit for what he published about a decade later, but got huge PR: the main premise in my Freeman-Dyson-influenced article:
"Human Destiny and the End of Time" [Quantum, No.39, Winter 1991/1992, Thrust Publications, 8217 Langport Terrace, Gaithersburg, MD 20877; ISSN 0198-6686
Wherein I specifically suggested that we were overwhelmingly likely to be simulations of our remote descendants a googol years from now, when they are embedded in dilute electron-positron ambiplasma civilization formed from collected and restructured Hawking radiation, all other
matter having long since tunneled into black holes...

Greg Benford made substantial use of my prior publication in his galactic core novels. We guys with Physics professionalism, Caltech degrees, and English Lit degrees need to keep in touch.

Oh, look, there's the one true index to indices, gotta go...

That slowed me down. :)

I've seen (mediocre) sf novels with thinner plots; they just flesh out the soap opera of the characters' daily living, postponing the conceptual breakthroughs with arguments, wars, chases escapes, lots of moping, and badly written sex. (A John Gribbin novel springs to mind. ;) )

Oh, and it's as foreboding as a thunderhead that you have a complete category called "storytime". ;)

So is this universe completely determinable by some set of initial conditions (i.e., on some sort of closed surface so that if you eventually go far enough on one direction then you get back where you started .... no boundaries) or are there boundaries that can be found and are presumably controlled by some sort of god or evil overlord?

Mollishka you are reading my mind for my next post about the Library of Laplace...

"...OOPS! BUMPED A WUMPUS"

Jonathan VP: The problem with your statistical argument that "we are most likely in a simulation", is that it assumes our successors have nothing better to do with their humungous resources than to run simulations of their own past. I suspect it's thermodynamically provable that the resources devoted to a simulation could always be used for a more complex, but less mediated, environment.

David Harmon: clever counterargument!

However, as with much Singularity Science Fiction, we are unable by definition to comprehend the motivations nor some actions of those on the other side of the Singularity, and beings a googol years from now are less knowable to us that ancient Icelanders or Greeks or Romans supposed their Gods to be. They ascribed petty human psychology to almost everything the Gods did.

I suspect that our remote descendants our our "successors have" LOTS "better to do with their humungous resources" than to simulate the age of solid matter and the era when people lived on planets. Some of them may spend a minor part of their time recreating our era, as some of us go to museums, watch "the 1900 House" on TV, read History and Biography, and go to Renaissance Pleasure Faires.

Imagine folks from the 30th century spending some time in a 20th Century Pleasure Faire, with re-creations of (say) Los Angeles before the Big One (or of New York New York in Las Vegas). A sub-subset of them pretend to be 20th century people attending a Renaissance Pleasure Faire. This can be nested arbitrarily deeply. Niven and Pournelle, in "A Mote in God's Eye" have a fine time with alien musuems that have exhibits of previous museums, and the uneasy conclusion that the humans reach, almost too late.

I suppose that the burden is on my to dig a copy out of the archives of the paper I had in "Quantum Science Fiction" and scan it to a PDF online, or find a digital version on some obsolete floppy disk. Some of the rational people on the fringe of the Cult of Bostrom have a point that their tin-pot God need not bother citing prior art in literature that he might not have read, especially if it undercuts his spurious priority.

It is bad in priority disputes to have published first, even much earlier, but in obscure venues that one's critics might not have in their library. I am very widely published, for a long time, but some of the proceedings and magazines are honestly rather little-known.

Still, you raise a thoughtful objection, and I thank you for taking the concept seriously enough to have engaged in original thought, as you so clearly have.

This is a delightful story, Dave!

One item that has been on my mind since last week (indicating some success in your motivation) is the form of "Toom's rule" that you introduce. I haven't been able to find an answer on the web on whether or not the NECSW rule is stable like the NEC rule is, although maybe I should just try running some simulations to find out for myself.

Since "Laplace's rule" is described as never having been observed to be violated over a signficant amount of time, there presumbaly is no noise (or it is very rare) in the update mechanics of the monolithic colors. Likewise, Toom's rule appears to be always be followed in the observable universe, and it has been tested for an extra generation, including tens of thousands of recorded observations. However, if Toom's rule allows robust storage of memory in a 2D array, then any islands of "top lines" or "bottom lines" will eventually be eaten up by the oceans surrounding them. As time goes on, there will be less frequent transitions possible between top and bottom lines, in the absence of noise. After many years of the olden days, spanning a very large number of 42 second intervals, it seems unlikely that there would be any appreciable number of transitions between top and bottom lines in the present age. In fact, with high likelihood, the local neighborhood would all have the same "spin value," so it would be difficult to test out Toom's rule, or for that matter, make the observations that could support the full nature of Laplace's rule. On the other hand, if the NECSW is, in fact, not stabilizing, then the above concerns are no longer an issue.

The narrator's "nightmare" raised an interesting (although perhaps trivial) problem in my mind. Suppose an inhabitant wants to never be surprised about the color in a particular room, and let us assume that Laplace's rule will always hold true. If he sleeps for x hours a night, how many rooms does he have to visit during his waking hours in order to not have missed any changes while asleep? It might get more nontrivial if we consider a finite speed of travel (and time for recording, computing, etc.) as he visits neighboring rooms. What is the optimal path? How about if he employs a network of friends stationed at particularly chosen rooms?