Robert Sawyer: Wake

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The range of it all! The scope!

There are billions of stars.

The sun is a star.

Earth revolves around the sun.

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EARLY ON, LENAT REALIZED THAT ONE OVERALL KNOWLEDGE BASE WOULDN’T DO: THINGS COULD BE TRUE IN ONE CONTEXT BUT FALSE IN ANOTHER. AND SO HIS TEAM ORGANIZED INFORMATION INTO “MICROTHEORIES” — CLUSTERS OF INTERRELATED ASSERTIONS THAT ARE TRUE IN A GIVEN CONTEXT. THAT ALLOWED CYC TO HOLD SUCH APPARENTLY CONTRADICTORY ASSERTIONS AS “VAMPIRES DO NOT EXIST” AND “DRACULA IS A VAMPIRE” WITHOUT BLOWING SMOKE OUT ITS EARS IN A “NORMAN, COORDINATE!” SORT OF WAY. THE FORMER ASSERTION BELONGED TO THE MICROTHEORY “THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE” AND THE LATTER TO “FICTIONAL WORLDS.” STILL, MICROTHEORIES COULD BE LINKED TO EACH OTHER WHEN APPROPRIATE: IF A WINEGLASS WAS DROPPED BY ANYONE — EVEN DRACULA — IT WOULD PROBABLY SHATTER…

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Absorbing knowledge! A torrent, a flood…

No child can be older than its parents.

No Picasso painting could have been made before he was born.

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BUT CYC IS MORE THAN JUST A KNOWLEDGE BASE. IT ALSO CONTAINS ALGORITHMS FOR DERIVING NEW ASSUMPTIONS BY CORRELATING THE ASSERTIONS ITS PROGRAMMERS PROVIDED. FOR INSTANCE, HAVING BEEN GIVEN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT MOST PEOPLE SLEEP AT NIGHT, AND THAT PEOPLE DON’T LIKE BEING AWAKENED UNNECESSARILY, IF ASKED WHAT SORT OF CALL MIGHT BE APPROPRIATE TO MAKE TO SOMEONE’S HOUSE AT 3:00 A.M., CYC WOULD OFFER “AN URGENT ONE…”

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Understanding! Comprehension!

Time flies like an arrow.

Fruit flies like a banana.

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THE PROJECT IS ONGOING: LENAT AND HIS GROUP — DOING BUSINESS AS CYCORP IN AUSTIN, TEXAS — ARE STILL WORKING ON IT NOW, ALMOST THREE DECADES AFTER THEY BEGAN. “WHEN AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FIRST APPEARS,” SAID LENAT IN AN INTERVIEW, “EITHER BY DELIBERATE DESIGN OR RANDOM CHANCE, IT WILL LEARN ABOUT OUR WORLD THROUGH CYC…”

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A rapid, thrilling expansion!

The Pope is Catholic.

Bears do shit in the woods.

Incredible, incredible. So much to take in, so many concepts, so many relationships — so many ideas! I absorbed over one million assertions about Prime’s reality from Cyc, and felt myself surging, growing, expanding, learning, and — yes, yes, at long last, I was starting to comprehend.

Caitlin harvested another set of cellular-automata data from webspace and ran a Shannon-entropy calculation on it.

Holy shit.

It was now showing something between fifth-and sixth-order entropy. It really did seem that whatever was lurking in the background of the Web was getting more complex.

More sophisticated.

More intelligent.

But even at fifth-or sixth-order, it was still lagging behind human communication, at least in English, which Kuroda had said had eighth-or ninth-order entropy.

But, then again, introducing the phantom to Cyc was merely the beginning…

Prime, in its wisdom, must have recognized that although I could learn much from Cyc, I still needed more help to understand it all. And so it directed my attention to another website. This new site yielded the information that an apple was a fruit (confirming something I now knew from Cyc); “apple of one’s eye” was an idiom; an idiom was a figure of speech; speech was words spoken aloud; aloud was vocally as opposed to mentally, as in a book read aloud; a book was a bound volume; volume was the amount of space something occupies but also a single book, especially one from a series…

I recognized what this new site was. Cyc had contained the assertion “a dictionary is a database defining words with other words.” This dictionary contained entries for 315,000 words. I absorbed them all. But many of them were still baffling, and some of the definitions led me in circles — a word defined as a synonym for another word that was defined as synonym of the original word.

But Prime wasn’t finished showing me things yet. Next stop: the WordNet database at Princeton University, which (as it described itself) was a “large lexical database” in which “nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are grouped into over 150,000 sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept; synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations.”

One such synset was “Good, right, ripe (most suitable or right for a particular purpose): ‘a good time to plant tomatoes’; ‘the right time to act’; ‘the time is ripe for great sociological changes’.” And that synset was distinct from many others, including “Good, just, upright (of moral excellence): ‘a genuinely good person’; ‘a just cause’; ‘an upright and respectable man’.”

More than that, WordNet organized terms hierarchically. My old friend CAT, it turned out, was at the end of this chain: animal, chordate, vertebrate, mammal, placental, carnivore, feline, cat.

The pieces were finally starting to fall into place…

The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel — which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue. Shoshana had her hands in the pockets of her cutoff jeans as she walked along. She was whistling “Feeling Groovy.” Feist’s cover of it was topping the charts this week; Sho was aware that there’d been a much earlier version by Simon and Garfunkel, but she only knew their names because of the chimp at Yerkes known as Simian Garfinkle. Dr. Marcuse was walking behind her, and, yes, she knew he was probably looking at her hips sway, but, hey, primates will be primates.

Hobo was up ahead, just outside the gazebo, staring off into the distance. He did that frequently these days, as if lost in thought, visualizing things that weren’t present instead of looking at things that were. The gentle wind happened to be blowing in a way that let him catch their scents, and suddenly he turned and grinned and starting running on all fours toward them.

He hugged Shoshana and then he hugged Marcuse — you needed a chimp’s arms to be able to reach all the way around the Silverback’s body.

Hobo been good? Shoshana signed.

Good good, Hobo signed back, figuratively — and probably literally — smelling a reward. Shoshana smiled and handed him some raisins, which he gobbled down.

The YouTube video of Hobo painting had been a great hit — and not just in YouTube star rankings and Digg and del.icio.us tagging. Marcuse and Shoshana had been on many talk shows now, and eBay bidding on the original portrait of her was up to $477,000 last time she looked.

Do another painting? Marcuse signed.

Maybe, Hobo signed back. He seemed to be in an agreeable mood.

Paint Dillon? Marcuse asked.

Maybe, Hobo signed. But then he bared his teeth. Who? Who?

Shoshana turned around to see what Hobo was looking at. Dillon was coming their way, accompanied by a very tall, burly man with a shaved head. They were crossing the wide lawn and heading toward the bridge to the island.

“Were we expecting anyone?” Marcuse asked Shoshana. She shook her head. Hobo needed to be prepared for visitors; he didn’t like them, and, truth be told, had been getting increasingly ornery about it of late. The ape made a hissing sound as Dillon and the big man crossed over the bridge.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Marcuse,” Dillon said as they closed the distance. “This man insisted that—”

“Are you Harl Pieter Marcuse?” asked the man.

Marcuse’s gray eyebrows went up. “Yes.”

“And who are you?” the man said, looking now at Shoshana.

“Um, I’m Shoshana Glick. I’m his grad student.”

He nodded. “You may be called upon to attest to the fact that I have indeed delivered this.” He turned to Marcuse again, and stuck out his hand, which was holding a thick envelope.