'He's done it!' she whispered, her eyes watering but her mouth dry as she watched the symphony of lights perform over the nitrogen pool.
With a rustling of his parka Griffith looked her way and fell silent.
Gray had made a brain. He'd done it. All the talk — all the fruitless research by so many for so long — and Gray had made it happen.
The goose bumps had free rein over Laura now, spreading not just to her arms but across her entire body. It was a feeling of exultation.
Of triumph. Of advancement. Laura reveled in it — in the euphoria that was released like a drug on suddenly appreciating the true magnitude of Gray's breakthrough.
'How could he ever figure it all out?' she said as if in a dream — not really asking a question, just giving voice to her disbelief. 'The complexity of it is phenomenal!'
'Oh, Mr. Gray didn't build the net.'
Laura spun instantly to the dark shape of the man. 'What do you mean? Who built this, then?'
'Well, now you're sort of getting into a philosophical question, I suppose. Certainly, Mr. Gray set the process in motion. He and Margaret put the computer to work on developing the net about three years ago. Gray implanted the seed program, but from then on it just sort of grew and…'
'What 'seed' program?'
In the darkness, it was impossible to read Griffith's facial expression. His response was slow in coming. 'Well… he… They didn't just start out with a completely blank slate. I mean, Gray had been toying with a lot of the theories, of course, for years. But they started with a program that initially worked solely on increasing the net's size, and it sort of grew around that base. About a year ago they filled up this pool: and added another — the annex — a half a klick from here. It has a much larger potential volume, but to date they only added roughly the same number of boards as the main pool here has.'
'And this seed program — it was Gray's?' Laura asked, [unclear] using hard on the inflection in Griffith's voice as he answered. 'Sure! Yeah.'
Laura nodded. The connections in her mind were all complete now.
The connections between the points in Gray's biography — the milestones on his path to becoming the richest man in his [missing].
From its humble beginnings on Wall Street, the child prodigy's math-deficient computer program had grown into… this!
'Why do you ask?' Griffith whispered. He sounded guarded, conspiratorial. 'What are you saying?' he pressed.
Laura was amazed. Somehow, at least one member of Gray's 'team' had not drawn the conclusions Laura thought were so clear.
'Nothing,' Laura said, not knowing why she was hesitant to share her thoughts with the man — one of Gray's top associates.
She went back to the thread of Griffith's last comment. 'So, you're saying that the seed program grew into this? That the computer built itself?'
Griffith hesitated a pause that Laura interpreted as disappointment at the evasive response. 'Oh, we supervised it, of course. But only at the most general level. Take my department — robotics. Each of our robots has its own miniature neural network — or mini net — and the first training we give those mini-nets is to have the main computer run them through the paces with simulations. When we needed greater kinesthetic capabilities for our Model Seven robots we just asked the computer to give them more kinesthesia training. More boards go in the pool, and the next thing you know the Model Sevens' motor skills begin to improve.'
Laura stared at the murky outline of the man, then turned back to the pool. The computer was busy talking to itself. 'You don't know how it works, do you?' she asked.
Griffith took his time in answering. 'Not a clue, really,' he replied at last.
12
The warm night air on the long walk to the assembly building was slowly thawing Laura's frozen feet. She had insisted on walking to the next stop on their tour. Not to rid herself of the chill, as she'd told Griffith, but to slow down her fast-forward journey through time so she could digest what she'd already learned.
But Griffith was unrelenting. He continued his crash course on the twenty-first century. 'The computer is analog, not digital. The light signals it sends aren't limited to just on or off like in a digital computer. They also are stronger or weaker, more or less, higher or lower, hotter or colder, depending on the intensity of the laser's signal and what information that signal is intended to represent.'
On and on he went, Laura gazing at the towering wonders that dotted Gray's small pocket of the future. 'The computer is massively parallel. It breaks any problem down into as many pieces as possible, and then it attacks all those pieces simultaneously.'
Laura's mind was completely saturated with new ideas — the buffers full of unprocessed data. But Griffith was a fountain of knowledge, and the valves of that fountain were wide-open. 'If it's a totally new problem, a neural net uses trial and error to solve it. And even after it figures the problem out, it's constantly testing, constantly rewiring itself to improve its efficiency.'
'Complex adaptive behavior,' Laura mumbled, struggling to imagine it all.
'After trillions and trillions of rewirings, we don't have even the faintest clue what the vast majority of the system does. And a major portion of the signals coming down the pike at any given time have reprogramming content that may completely change the operation of a given circuit board.'
A warm ocean breeze washed over them, and Laura shook her head — her own circuits overloaded. 'It sounds like it's a complete mess,' she said. 'A total jumble.'
'It's that,' Griffith said, turning to her and smiling. 'But in that randomness, something wonderful happens.' The tone of his voice had changed. He now seemed not to be discussing nuts and bolts but something much more sublime. 'Once… once I was on the shell — that's the global user interface — and out of the blue the computer said, 'Have you ever noticed that some clouds look like faces?'' Laura looked up at him. He didn't need to explain the significance of the computer's question. She felt every bit of the torment evident in his voice. 'I had the computer trace the synaptic routing of that thought, and I found out what had happened. The computer had been taking meteorological readings over a launch pad. When a cloud passed by, the board that looked for bad weather assigned the image a high priority — a strong synaptic weighting — and fired it out through all its connections for further processing. Other boards decided whether the cloud might be prone to electrical discharge, or micro burst potential, or whatever. If it looked dangerous, those boards upped the signal's weighting and fired the processed information out through all their connections. The boards that didn't care about the cloud did the opposite — they reduced the signal strength before passing the image on. Most of the paths were dead ends — a series of boards each reducing the signal's strength until it died out completely. On one of those dead ends — before the picture of this cloud died out — it landed in a board that traced edges in video images. That board found a pattern. It traced lines through the contours of the cloud and decided the image was in the shape of a face. Now, what do you think about that?'
'I… I think it's… wonderful! It's an analogy!' It was exactly what Gray had described on their walk earlier that night. 'With analogies, it can make generalizations!' Laura said, growing more and more excited as what Gray and Griffith had said began to sink in. She spoke more and more rapidly, gesticulating with her hands to help make her points. 'With generalizations, it can learn! It can tell a sofa is for sitting because it looks sort of like a chair! With that kind of learning potential, it could become…!' The words caught in her throat.
