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Firestorm 2034 >
Chapter Ten: Logical Rocks
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Taberah read avidly; he wished to derive as much benefit from the four books he had been lent (four! -- the Vulgate Versio, the Revised New American Standard Bible, The New Message: Complete Text, Revised, and Harrah's New College Latin and English Dictionary, Revised) before they had to be returned to the patron who owned them. He very much wished to meet the man. It was about a week before he began to see that his hosts wanted him to talk with them from time to time -- mostly out good manners; he had never been in the possession of even two books at the same time, and never encouraged to read outside! -- and another week before Aed sat down with him to try to explain to him that there was life outside of books.
Then Taberah became a fount of unending questions, questions as startling as those Clancy and Fiona had asked as a child -- and yet questions that showed the intellect of a sharp adult. They were, nine times out of ten, questions about things he would never think about, and questions he had no ready answer for. At times Aed thought it would have been easier to answer, "Why do things look smaller when they are farther away?"
One day, Aed was sitting in his chair and thinking about how quickly his children were growing up -- and he was beginning to think of Taberah as a child, or a foster child at least -- and realizing that things had been silent for too long. This was longer than the silence after Taberah had realized that a screwdriver can unscrew the screws that were holding the blender together...
"Aed!"
"Yes, Taberah, what is it?"
"Aed, what is this?"
The sound of his voice was coming from a specific room, it was coming from --
Oh, no! Aed thought. Anything but that. I am ready to explain anything but-- but his feet had carried him to the room Taberah was in.
"Aed, what is this?" Taberah repeated.
A dozen replies flitted through his mind: a moving picture, something to think with, a hobbyist's delight, a shortcut in talking with people --
"This is a rock that can do logic."
"What?"
"This is a rock that can do arithmetic and logic very, very quickly."
Taberah said, confused, "How numbers they and logic they make a picture move?"
Aed sighed. "Taberah, can I answer another question? This one's awfully hard to explain."
Taberah slowly said, "Yes. What question to answer?" But his eyes betrayed him.
Aed thought, and asked, "Do you know that clock in the living room?"
Taberah said, "Yes. Why have you a clock? And not you use it to pray? It rings bells, but I not you see not pray."
Aed said, "One question at a time, please. Do you know what it has inside?"
"I have seen opened one clock."
If he'd opened the grandfather clock, he had put it back in working order. Aed respected the lad's abilities, but this seemed too much. Or had he opened another clock? "What did you see inside, child?"
"Springs rods gears moving beautiful!" Taberah said, his eyes glowing with excitement.
"Do you know how clocks work?"
Taberah said, "Yes," followed shortly by, "No. What?"
Aed moved his forearms like the hands of a clock. "Know why hands turn?" he said.
"Yes! Fixed hands, stopped turning."
Aed said, "You can do many things with gears and pulleys. You can store numbers, add them, make decisions: if this rod is here, turn. A computer is like that, only it uses things besides gears. It uses pictures on tiny rocks. And it is very fast."
Taberah looked at Aed, and then looked at the computer screen. He was trying to believe him, but just couldn't see a connection.
Aed said, "See this wall? Look very closely. There are arranged pieces of color. They are called pixels. Do you see them?"
Taberah squinted, and touched the surface. "I see."
Aed said, "The computer uses numbers and rules to decide what color to make each pixel. All of them together make a picture."
Taberah closed his eyes in concentration. He moved his hands, sorting out concepts. Then --
"Why is the picture moving?"
"Because the computer is making many different pictures, one after another, and together they look like they're moving. The moving picture is made up of still pictures like the still pictures are made up of pixels."
Taberah stared at a small patch of the wall as colors flowed. His face met with a dawning comprehension. Then he said, "The computer very, very intelligent! I want talk with computer."
Aed shook his head. "You can't, son."
"Why not?"
"The computer is not intelligent."
"But you said it can do logic!"
"It can do logic, but it's not intelligent."
Taberah ran out of the room, and returned holding the Latin-English dictionary. He flipped through several the entries, several times, and then looked at Aed in puzzlement. "I don't understand."
Aed said, "Can you write?"
Taberah said, "I can write Latin. I not know not the script of your books."
Aed said, "One moment." He returned, holding a notebook and a pencil.
"Write down, with logical rules, how to talk in a conversation. In your language," he said.
Taberah's jaw dropped in shock. "Write that on paper?" Taberah would as soon scratch the surface of a painting as write something that unimportant on precious paper.
Aed scratched his head. He didn't see what could possibly be so offensive about an innocuous attempt to write rules. "Ok, don't write that. But can you think of rules for a conversation?"
Taberah began to translate a Quixotic code of etiquette.
"No, not those rules. Logical rules."
Taberah looked frustrated. "But polite is reasonable!"
"Explain to me how to talk using only if-then-else and while-this-is-true rules, and words you decide ahead of time."
Taberah's gaze bore into him. Then, "I can't. That isn't how I talk."
"That isn't how anybody talks. You can't talk that way. But that's the only way a computer can work. Computers can't think."
"Then how create beautiful moving picture?"
"Some people spent a lot of time thinking of clever ways to explain how, using only math and logic. There are a lot of things we can do, but a lot of things we can't do. We have an old phrase, 'silver bullet', which refers to a way to make everything easy with computers and fix all problems. The term is kind of a joke; calling something a silver bullet is a way of saying that it's supposed to do something impossible. And the same thing has happened with the effort to make computers think -- it's called artificial intelligence, and people have learned a lot from trying to do it, but they haven't succeeded. A very great mind named Alan Turing proposed the Turing Test: a computer is intelligent if you can't tell it from a human when you talk with it. No computer has been able to make it."
Taberah looked irritated, flipped through memories of conversations, and said, disgustedly, "Bad reason! False reason!"
"What, Taberah?"
"Is bad think. What human is and what human talks like is much different thing. If logic is not whole human reason, talk is not whole human reason." He flipped through the book, and read out, "Confusion, accident, substance." He closed the dictionary. "Is accident confused with substance. And is possible cheat Turing Test."
"Cheat on the Turing Test? How? How can you talk like a human without understanding human reason?"
Taberah closed his eyes, and said, "Moving picture? How? How can you move like world without understanding world?"
Aed thought for a moment, and said, "I see how you can think that. But decades of attempts have failed to produce anything that can even cheat on the Turing Test. Most people don't try."
Taberah looked in the book. "Fifty attempts are not many."
Aed said, "Not fifty. Over fifty years' worth."
"Why number attempts in years? Is not sense."
It took a good two hours more conversation to answer all the questions Taberah came up with, and afterwards Aed padded off to his bedroom, exhausted, but at least happy to have gotten that conversation out of the way. He drifted off to sleep in blissful happiness that tomorrow was Saturday, and he could sleep in until noon.
At 10:00 he was awakened by a voice calling, "Aed! Aed! How to use computer?"
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Chapter Ten: Logical Rocks
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