The Quantum Connection

CHAPTER 6

A couple of months passed before I made any headway at all on the Quantum Connected CPUs. I spent weeks on the Framework, in chat rooms, newsgroups, and downloading books on quantum mechanics, statistics, EPR experiments, Bell's Inequality, Schroedinger's Cat, and the effects of measurements on quantum phenomena. It turns out that although people had been trying to do quantum teleportation and such in experiments, nobody had really put it together with computing. It seemed kind of obvious to me once I was educated on the subject. Larry told me that that is 'typical of classified projects.' After all, isn't it pretty damned obvious that if you don't want the surface of your aircraft to reflect radar back at the radar then you should minimize the surface area that the radar aperture sees? Maybe it wasn't, since the stealth technologies were unheard of for years. But, now that the cat is out of the bag, it's useless. Larry also had told me something that Heinlein, this science fiction author that I had never heard of, had written. Heinlein had once said something like 'a secret weapon must be just that, a secret.' It makes sense when you think about it. Larry then acted appalled and frightened that I had never heard of Heinlein, and then threatened to fire me if I didn't complete a book of his per month until I had read them all.

'Consider this a reading assignment for your job, Steven. Sooner or later it'll become clear why I want you to read any and all science fiction you can get your hands on. Start with Heinlein,' Larry told me.

At any rate, we finally made some headway on the Quantum Connected CPUs (or QCCPUs as we had begun to call them). I had remembered something from a class on Computational RAM and Intelligent Parallel Processing that gave me a hint.

There have been a few companies to attempt to create RAM chips that had miniature processors at each RAM block of mem ory. The processors would conduct the computation or data crunching in place at each memory location on the RAM chip itself rather than on a separate large processor chip. The problem is that the data must be massively parallel and so must the problem for such chips to be useful. As a solution to the massive parallel problem these companies had then tried to add some artificial intelligence to each of the processors within the RAM to help break the problem down into more separate and parallel parts. If you just wanted to add a simple sequence of numbers together, this type of computer gained you some speed. The artificial intelligence would teach itself to break up the numbers into sections that would make use of having multiple memory slots and multiple processors like the following example:

RAM1 RAM2 RAM3

1+2= 3 3+4= 7 5+6= 11 1 CPU clock cycle

3+7= 10 2 CPU clock cycles

10 + 11= 21 3 CPU clock cycles.

The sequential calculation without breaking the problem up and with only one RAM slot and one processor would look like:

RAM1

1+2 = 3 1 CPU clock cycle

3+3 = 6 2 CPU clock cycles

6+4 = 10 3 CPU clock cycles

10+5 = 15 4 CPU clock cycles

15+6 = 21 5 CPU clock cycles

which is two clock cycles longer. So you see where the AIs on the chip and the multiple processors might help. The typical AI for problems like this were genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic. Sometimes people used neural networks to do the problem devolving and re-evolving, but I had a different idea. I decided to put a team of Agents on the job.

With the advent of the Framework and even before, Agents had become the industry standard approach for controlling large problems without necessarily placing the user in the loop. Of course, the best Agents could talk to the user through some interface or other. If you are not certain what I am talking about when I say an Agent, then you haven't been paying attention to computer stuff for about thirty years. That favorite search engine you use on the Web utilizes Agents. The Agents crawl around from one website to another making decisions on if this website has your information parameters in it and to what level of confidence. Now these are simple agents. Real Agents are actually persistent pieces of software that are completely dedicated to a specific purpose. One of the early real Agents, that I recall anyway, was called the SodaBot Agent and was invented by a guy at MIT's AI Lab. I believe that guy's name was Michael Coen or something like that. Well, he was developing his SodaBot code to be a program that could engage in negotiations and dialog with a system, and coordinate the transfer and exchange of information between systems.

A perfect science fiction example of this is Agent Smith from The Matrix. Agent Smith was simply a bit of software code whose total purpose was to look for anomalies and stop them no matter what. He had enough intelligence to carry out his function and he could definitely engage in 'negotiations' and 'exchange' information (or gunfire, which in The Matrix was just information packets).

Well, I decided to create my own bunch of little Agent Smiths and SodaBots. I had built smaller agent-type programs before but never a real Agent. I spent several weeks reverse programming Agents that I downloaded from the Framework before I decided on the right type and features that my team of SuperAgents would have. I finished the code for one SuperAgent, copied it once, and then confined each copy to the input of a respective CPU and RAM on each side of the QCCPU. In other words, there would be a SuperAgent on each side of the Quantum Connection to engage in and coordinate the transfer of the proper information to the proper mini-processors and RAM locations.

Two months later and I was demonstrating my two-hundred-billion-terraflop computer on a single board the size of an index card, which only used about a tenth of a watt of power, to Larry and his boss in the SAP/SAR room, where it was always kept now.

'Jesus, Larry, is this real?' Dr. Jack Frehley asked Larry.

'Well, Jack, as far as I can tell our boy here has done it. I have tried giving that damned thing complex tensor math calculations and had the answer about as fast as I could type the damned question. Steve's done it, I believe.' Larry was as proud of me as ever and it made me feel good. Not sure what the protocol in the conversation was, I kept quiet.

'Well, Mr. Montana what do you have to say about this?'

'I agree with Larry. Uh . . . I have not been able to do a problem or code on it yet that didn't give the right