town, he’ll be there with them. Go, go, go” Gene shouted the last bit like a drill sergeant.
Twenty minutes later, showered and dressed in office clothes, they were on their way. Having learned their lesson from earlier interactions, they knew that what they had to say was hard enough for people to believe. They agreed that they needed to look as presentable and normal as possible, to lessen the chance of being perceived as being crazy. Even Gene was clean shaven, and well dressed in a pressed suit, shirt and tie.
After a short drive, they arrived at the King’s Plaza Diner. Across the street was the diner’s namesake, a large shopping mall known as King’s Plaza. They entered the diner, and were greeted by the hostess.
“Three for the counter,” Gene said to the hostess. He turned and said quietly to Mike and David, “We can keep an eye on the entrance, but avoid looking like stalkers.”
David and Mike stared with wide eyes at the gold tinted mirrors and six foot chandeliers throughout the restaurant. “This is some diner,” David commented.
“According to the folks I talked to last night, the Kings Plaza Diner is famous among Brooklynites, and that includes the Russian population. If nothing else, they said to get a cup of coffee and a piece of cheesecake.”
“Wow, look at these pickles,” Mike burst out, when the waitress brought an enormous silver bowl brimming with pickles of all kinds.
“Come on guys, let’s stay focused. We are not here for the food,” David implored.
“Hey, when in New York, do like the New Yorkers,” Gene said to David. Turning, he said to the approaching waitress, “Coffee and cheesecake for me.”
“Sure, sweetheart.” The platinum haired waitress had a coffee pot in one hand, and started pouring coffees. She stared smiling at Gene the whole time, but somehow managed to fill each cup perfectly.
“Coffees all around,” Mike said.
“What’ll you kids have to eat?” She kept her eyes on Gene as she took their order.
Mike ordered an omelet plate, while David picked a bagel with lox and cream cheese.
After the waitress left, Mike turned to Gene. “Didn’t know you had such a way with the ladies.”
Gene just rumbled under his breath, but the corners of his mouth turned up a little.
They had finished eating and were on their second cups of coffee when Mike observed Sean coming into the restaurant with two older people.
“Here they are,” said Mike, gesturing discretely towards the entrance.
David turned his head, and seeing Sean, he stood up, and walked over. Mike and Gene followed slightly behind.
“Hello Sean,” David called as he approached.
Sean blinked for a moment, as he tried to place the face out of context. “David? David Ryan? What are you doing here?”
“We came to meet you. We have a critical issue with the ELOPe program.”
Sean took a step backwards. “David, I’m here with my parents. Please don’t tell me you tracked me down here for work. That would be a terrible violation of my privacy. Why didn’t you just schedule a meeting with my admin?”
“We’re here with Gene Keyes, one of the members of the Controls and Compliance department because we have an issue of the utmost seriousness. I hate to sound alarmist, but the issue is very sensitive, and we couldn’t risk talking with your admin.”
As David spoke, Mike and Gene walked up, and Gene introduced himself.
“Contacting your assistant was unfortunately not an option, though we would have preferred to do that if we could have,” David continued, thinking about the email which resulted in them getting kicked off the Avogadro campus. Shaking aside the unwanted memory, he continued. “Please may we have five minutes of your time to explain? Get a cup of coffee here at the counter with us, and by the time you’ve finished it, we’ll have explained everything we know.”
Sean thought for a moment, and then nodded. “Fine, if you believe it is so serious, I’ll hear you out.”
Sean walked over to his parents, who had been waiting patiently, and spoke quietly with them for a moment. When the maitre’d escorted his parents to a table, Sean rejoined the three men.
“Go ahead David, I want to hear about this issue. I’ll give you ten minutes. I know you’re a smart guy. I’m guessing you didn’t fly three thousand miles for nothing.”
Sean perched on a barstool at the counter, and accepted a cup from the waitress. As they drank coffee, David told the story starting at the beginning.
“In early December, Gary Mitchell was ready to kick ELOPe off the AvoMail production server pool. Even in our limited development and testing, the computationally intensive parts of our code were consuming so many resources that it caused AvoMail to dip into their reserve capacity on several occasions. This was around the same time that I was presenting to you, Kenneth, and Rebecca,” David explained, referring to the other members of the executive leadership team.
“We had tried everything we could to get performance improvements, but we didn’t think any other big gains were possible. I realized that if Gary was going to kick us off his servers because we couldn’t improve performance, then we needed to find other servers, or get new ones, and I didn’t think Gary would be willing to help us with either. So I resorted to the only option I could think of.”
David paused to drink his coffee. He glanced up to see that even though Mike and Gene had heard the story before, they were just as captivated as Sean.
“I decided there was no argument I could make that was compelling enough to change Gary’s mind. So I decided to let ELOPe do it. ELOPe was already running on the AvoMail servers, configured to ignore everything that wasn’t our test emails. I changed the configuration so that it would filter all company emails looking for any mention of the project. I configured it for the same settings we used for performance testing: The user interface was off, so the email sender would never see the modifications being made to the email.”
“In performance testing mode, we turn logging off, so we can get a realistic idea of real-world performance,” Mike said. “This also meant we didn’t have any log of the changes that ELOPe was making, which turns out to be important.”
“That’s right. Thanks, Mike,” David continued. “But that wasn’t the only change I made. To speed up analysis, and optimize performance on a handful of specific criteria, we already had some hand-tuned rules implemented in a lookup table that allow us to shortcut the full analysis process. If you remember that example I used of an email requesting resources for a project: rather than analyze that email and every other email requesting project resources, we cache and hand-tune some suggested language. Well, I added the subject ‘ELOPe’ to that table, and adjusted parameters to the algorithm to allow ELOPe the widest possible discretion in changing the email language to optimize the results for a positive outcome.”
“What we’ve guessed,” Mike jumped in again, “is that when David did this, the parameters he chose, in combination with the fact that the system is in performance test mode, allowed ELOPe not just to modify existing emails, but to autonomously generate emails on its own. It’s part of the test suite. Does this make sense?”
“Sure,” Sean said, nodding. “During testing, you don’t want people to have to hand-edit an email, and accept the changes interactively. You just want to batch process a bunch of emails. But why does it have the ability to generate emails on its own?”
“For one, it allowed us to test the natural language generation,” David answered. “Early on, the email analysis and language generation were two separate aspects of the project. The members of the team who were working on the code to generate natural sounding language wrote an email generator, so that they could independently test the ability of the system to mimic the way a person normally writes. We had hundreds of test subjects who rated emails, some of which were written by an actual person they knew, and some were generated by the system pretending to be that person. Our goal at the time was that ninety percent of ELOPe generated emails would pass as being written by the purported sender.”
“You met that goal?”
“Yes,” confirmed Mike. “Now ELOPe exceeds ninety-eight percent. In fact, on April First, there were endless practical jokes on the team as everyone played with the test system to generate prank emails. Both David and I fell for it.”
David smiled at the memory.
“Getting back to the problem,” Gene said, “unfortunately we now have evidence that ELOPe is manipulating others.”
