basically, everything that turns sounds, images, smells, small pressures, temperatures, weather changes, and even spiritual impulses into electrical impulses. With four thousand I bought various reagents, laboratory glassware, chemical equipment — in case I ever wanted to employ chemotronics, about which I had heard a little. (And if I'm going to be completely honest, because it was easy to buy this stuff by requisition. I don't have to mention the fact that I didn't use any of the eighty thousand for personal effects.)
All this was fine, but the core of the experiment was still missing. I knew what I wanted: a commutator that could switch and combine random signals from the sensors in order to send them to a “reasoning” computer — a piece of an electronic brain with a free circuit of connections of several thousand switching cells. You can't get something like that even by written order — it doesn't exist. Buy the parts that make up the usual computers (diodes, triodes, resistors, condensers, etc.) and order one? It would take too long, and was completely unrealistic. I would have to supply a detailed blueprint for something like that, but what I wanted couldn't have a blueprint. It was really a case of not knowing where I would go or what I would find. And once more my friend chance gave me my “I don't know what” and Lena…. Wait. Here I'm not willing to put it all down to chance. Meeting Lena was a gift of fate, pure and simple. But as for the crystal unit… if you think about something day and night, you'll always come up with it, find or notice it.
Here was the situation: three weeks left 'til the end of the year; fifty thousand rubles still unused; no hopes of finding the commutator; and I'm riding a bus.
“They bought fifty thousand rubles worth of solid — state circuits and then they found out they don't fit!” a woman in a brown fur coat was exclaiming in front of me to her neighbor. “That's disgusting!” “Madness,” she agreed.
“Now Pshembakov is trying to blame everything on the supply department. But he ordered them himself!” “Just think of the gall!”
The words “fifty thousand” and “solid — state circuits” had gotten my attention. “Excuse me, but what kind of circuits?”
The woman turned to me, her face so beautiful and stern that I was sorry I had interrupted.
“ 'Not — ors' and flip — flops!” she answered hotly.
“What parameters?”
“Low — voltage — excuse me, but why are you butting into our conversation?”
And that's how I met Elena Ivanovna Kolomiets, an engineer from the nearby construction design bureau. The following day, engineer Kolomiets wrote a pass for executive engineer Krivoshein to visit her department. “Savior! Benefactor!” cried the head of the department, Zhalbek Balbekovich Pshembakov, when engineer Kolomiets introduced me and explained that I could buy up the bureau's damned solid — state circuits. But I agreed to benefact and save Zhalbek Balbekovich only on the following conditions: (a) all 38,000 cells would be mounted on panels in accordance with a rough sketch I gave him; (b) the cells would be connected by feed bars; (c) each cell would be wired and; (d) all this would be done by the end of the year.
“You have great production forces here. It won't be difficult for you.”
“For the same money? But the cells themselves cost fifty thousand!”
“Yes, but they didn't fit the FTD. Keep that in mind.”
“You're a scourge, not a benefactor,” said Zhalbek Balbekovich, sadly waving his hand. “Fill out the order, Elena Ivanovna. We'll send it in from our department. And I'm putting this whole thing in your hands.”
May Allah bless your name, Zhalbek Balbekovich!
To this very day, I think that I won Lena's heart not with my great qualities, but because — when the cells had been mounted on the panels and the edges of the microelectrical cube looked like fields of colorful wires — I answered her tremulous question “And how should they be connected?” with a devil — may — care:
“However you like! Blue to red — and make sure it's aesthetically pleasing!”
Women respect the irrational.
And that's how it all happened. Chance does make itself felt. (Oh, now it's beginning to seem that during the course of my work I've developed a worshipful attitude toward chance! The fanaticism of a convert…. Before, to tell the truth, I was a real sluggard, preaching humility and resignation in the face of “unlucky” events. If you think about it, such feelings always mask our spiritual laziness and complacency. Now I was beginning to understand an important aspect of chance, whether in life or science: you won't conquer it with reason alone. Working with chance demands quick thinking, initiative, and a readiness to change your plans… but it's just as stupid to worship it as it is to deride it. Chance is neither enemy nor friend, neither God nor devil. Whether chance is mastered or lost depends on the person. And those who believe in luck and fate can go out and buy lottery rickets!)
“But the name laboratory of Random Research' is too odious,” said Arkady Arkadievich, signing the order to establish an unstructured lab, directed by engineer Krivoshein, with the concomitant material, fire safety, and other responsibilities. “You shouldn't give people straight lines. Let's call it something more restrained, like 'New Systems Laboratory. And then we'll see.”
That meant that doing my dissertation remained my major problem. Beyond that, it was “we'll see.” I have yet to solve the problem.
Chapter 7
If an identification computer, or perceptron, signals “garbage” in response to a picture of an elephant, to the depiction of a camel, and to the portrait of a major scientist, this does not necessarily mean that it is irreparable. It may just be philosophically inclined
Naturally, I had hoped, for my spirits, that the work would be livelier. How could I not dream, when the mastermind of cybernetics, Walter Ross Ashby, doctor of neurophysiology, kept coming up with ideas, each more entrancing than the next! Random processes as the source of the development and ruin of any system, strengthening the thinking capabilities of humans and machines by distinguishing the valuable thoughts from the nonsense in random expression…. and finally, noise as the raw material for extracting information — yes, yes, the “white noise,” that troublemaker on which I lost more than one year and more than one idea trying to drive it out of circuitry!
In general, if you think about it, the founder of this tendency has to be considered not Dr. Ashby, but the now — forgotten director of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, who (in order to create ominous rumblings in the crowd scenes of Boris Godunov) first ordered each extra to repeat his home address and phone number. But Ashby has posited solving the reverse problem. We take noise — the surf, the hiss of coal dust in a mike, anything — and plug it into a machine. From the noise chaos we extract the largest “splashes.” This gives us a pattern of impulses. And impulse patterns are binary numbers. And binary figures can be changed into decimal ones. And decimals are numbers: for example, the numbers assigned to words in a dictionary for machine translation. And a collection of words is a sentence. Of course, for now, the sentences are varied: false, real, abracadabra — informational raw material. But the next cascade will have two streams of information — the kind that is intelligible to people, and this raw material. Then operations of comparison, coincidence, and noncoincidence — and everything nonsensical is filtered out, as is the banal. Then original new thoughts, discoveries and inventions, the works of unborn poets and writers, philosophical thoughts from the future appear! A thinking computer!
Of course, the respected doctor did not explain how to perform this miracle. His idea is embodied only in squares connected by arrows on a piece of paper. In general, the question of how to do it is not highly esteemed in academic circles. “If you remove yourself from the difficulties of technical realization, then in principle you will be able to imagine….” But how can I remove myself from it?
Well, enough whining! That's why I'm an experimenter, in order to test ideas. That's why I have a lab. The walls give off the smell of fresh oil paint. The air conditioner hums. New instruments shine on the equipment
