Harry Harrison - The Turing Option

“I should have called first. But I just got back from L.A. and wanted to put you in the picture about progress. I have been working with some of the best investigators in the LAPD. With the kind of work you are doing I’m sure you know all about Expert Systems?”

“I wouldn’t say all — and I am surely out of touch with work done in the last years. But tell me, what language do you write your programs in?”

“LAMA 3.5.”

He smiled. “That’s good news. My father was one of the team that developed LAMA, Language for Logic and Metaphor. Is your machine detective up and running?”

“Yes, it is in a working prototype stage. Works well enough to be interesting. I call it ‘Dick Tracy.’ ”

“How does it work?”

“Basically, it is pretty straightforward. Three main sections. The first is a bunch of different Expert Systems, each with a specific job to do. These specialists are controlled by a fairly simple manager that looks for correlations and notices whenever several of them agree on anything. One of them has already searched through data bases all over the country, making lists of all transportation methods. Now it is compiling its own data bases about automobiles, trucks, air travel and so on. Even water transportation systems.”

“Out here in the desert?”

“Well, the Salton Sea is not very far. Then I have a lot of other specialist programs compiling various kinds of geographic data, especially satellite scans in this area for the period of time we are interested in.”

“Sounds good.” Brian stood. “I’m getting stiff — want to walk a bit?”

“Of course.” She looked about her as they strolled down the path. “Is this a military base? There seem to be an awful lot of soldiers about.”

“All mine,” he said, and smiled. “You notice how they keep pace with us?”

“I like that.”

“I like it even more. As you might imagine I don’t really look forward to a fourth attack on my life. Now the question is, can the system you’ve put together help us catch up with those crooks? Has Dick Tracy come up with hot leads yet?”

“Not really. It is still processing data.”

“Then throw it onto a GRAM and bring it here. The big computer that I’m using will give you all the computational power that you could ever need.”

“That would really speed things up. I’ll need a day or two to pull all the loose ends together.” She glanced up at the sun. “I think that I better go now. I am sure that I can get everything finalized by Wednesday, copy all my notes, and bring the GRAM out Thursday morning.”

“Perfect. I’ll walk you back to the guardhouse — I’m not allowed near the gate — and let Woody know what is happening.”

After she had gone he realized that he should have asked her for a copy of LAMA 3.5 — then laughed at his stupidity. The days of carrying programs around on disks, other than those that needed top security, were long gone. He headed for the lab. He probably had a copy of the program there on CD ROM. If not he could download from a data base.

This new-old world of 2024 still took some getting used to.

February 21, 2024

Benicoff and Evgeni were waiting in front of Brian’s lab when he got there in the morning.

“This is Evgeni’s last day here and we want to check you out on the whole system before he leaves.”

“Back to Siberia, Evgeni?”

“Soon I hope — you got too hot a place here. But first I go to do a bunch of tutorials in Silicon Valley, finish technical instruction on latest hardware. USA make them, Russia buy them, I fix them. Help design next version. Plenty of rubles in Evgeni’s future, bet my arse.”

“Good luck — and plenty of rubles. What’s the program, Ben?” He touched his thumb to the plate and the door clicked open.

“Troubleshooting. All the equipment has been set up and is operating — Evgeni is a great technician.”

“Write that out on paper — recommendation worth plenty more rubles!”

“I will, don’t worry. But when you go we don’t want to have any more technicians around this place.”

“Sounds a winner. But what if a massive crash knocks out the whole system?”

“There not one system — is network of couple systems. Each got copy of network program that contains all diagnostic material from every machine. On top of this every memory and diagnostic report is copied from each machine to a couple of others every few minutes.”

“So whatever goes wrong, we should usually be able to recover all the functions. At the worst, we might only lose what was computed in the past few minutes.”

“Da. And in most cases, lose nothing at all. “You got trouble, E-mail to me in…”

“Visitors at the front entrance,” the security computer said.

Brian touched an ikon on the screen, and it displayed a view from the outside video pickup. Two soldiers were standing at attention, one on each side of Captain Kahn.

“Back in a minute,” he said, then walked the length of the lab to the entrance and thumbed open the door for her.

“I hope I’m not too early? The Major told me that you were already here.”

“No, perfect timing. Let me show you your terminal and get you set up. I guess you’ll want to download your program and files first.”

She took a GRAM out of her purse. “All in here. I didn’t want to send them through public lines. This is now the only copy — the rest has been wiped from the police computer. There is an awful lot of classified material that we don’t want anyone else looking at.”

He led the way through the lab to a partitioned office at the far end.

“Just the terminal, desk and chair here now,” he said. “Let me know if there is anything else you might need.”

“This will be fine.”

“Done,” Ben said, standing and stretching. “I double-checked and Evgeni has done a great job. All the instructions for accessing and using the programs are right here in RAM.”

“I want to see that — but can you wait half a mo’? Shelly just came in and we can talk to her as soon as she has downloaded her Expert Program. This is a good chance for us to find out how far she has gotten.”

They walked Evgeni to the entrance, where he pumped their hands strenuously.

“Good equipment, good fun working here!”

“Good luck — and plenty rubles.”

“Da!”

Shelly turned around in her chair when they came in and pointed to the empty office.

“Sorry about the hospitality.”

“I’ll get a couple of chairs,” Ben said. “And some coffee. Anyone else interested? No? Two chairs then and one coffee.”

“Any results to tell us about?” Brian said.

“Some. I have written the program to link the data-base manager with the discovery program and the human interface. It is mostly — I hope — debugged. I started it up with the goal of solving the Megalobe robbery. It has been running now for a couple of days. By now it might be ready to answer some questions. I held off until you were both here at the same time. This is your investigation, Ben. Do you want to go ahead?”

“Sure. How do I get into the program?”

“I started out using a working label of ‘Dick Tracy’ — and it stuck, I’m afraid. That and your name are all you need.”