The Hacker and the Ants (3 page)

Tunelessly humming, I looked up from the dollhouse and stared at the images riding my Lorenz attractor. Most of them were quite familiar, but what with my hookup to the Net and the existence of some more or less autonomous processes in our company machines, I would sometimes spot a new icon. Today the new one
was a little 3-D image of an ant, a sweetly made photo-realistic model with mandibles, head, antennae, alitrunk, legs, petiole, and gaster—the spitting image of the virtual ants that Roger Coolidge had been working on in his lab at GoMotion. But no way were any GoMotion ants supposed to be loose like this. I pincered it up with virtual thumb and forefinger. It wriggled its legs and turned its head to bite me. The ant bite made a tingling physical flutter in my glove's touchpads. There was a noise with it, a double burst of skritchy chaos. I dropped the ant. Chirping angrily, it dug its way down through my virtual office floor and disappeared.

Instead of chasing after the ant, I pointed my finger to the GoMotion door and nodded in there. The necessary information traveled over the Fibernet and then for a moment I saw nothing but a snowstorm of static, as the GoMotion communication software checked my access codes. There was a warbling tone as our systems synced together, and then I walked into the virtual offices of GoMotion.

How did I look? Like most users, I owned a tailor-made simmie of my cyberspace body. Cyberspace users called their body-simmies
tuxedos
. My tuxedo was a suite of video images bitmapped onto a blank humanoid form. The form's surface was a mesh of triangles which could be adjusted like a dressmaker's dummy; and inside the form were virtual armatures and hinges so that the thing moved about as realistically as one of those little wooden mannequins that artists used to have. The overall size of the thing was adjusted to closely match my body size with, of course, a few inches taken off the waist.

I'd had my body surfaces taped by a professional body-mapping studio right there in Los Perros: Dirk Blanda's Personography. You'd go to Dirk Blanda's and in the reception area there was a wall with plaster body-shapes
lined up against it. Mounted on the ceiling over each body was a video projector beaming a satisfied customer's image onto one of the body-shaped screens. Dirk Blanda's had started out as a photo studio, but when the last big quake had wiped out his building, he'd retooled and gotten modern. I actually knew Dirk fairly well as his house was almost next to mine.

The tuxedo I used was pretty routine; it showed me wearing what I usually wore in real life, which was sandals, patterned socks, shorts, and a California sport shirt. I could change the patterns of the fabrics of my socks and shirt, and if I wanted to, I could get new simmie clothes, or I could even turn my clothes off entirely. The nude version of my tuxedo allowed me the option of deciding whether or not my simmie-genitals should show. In any case, the face was the important part. I had a series of canned expression shots; Dirk's assistant had spent the better part of two hours coaching me into convincing expressions of laughter, surprise, boredom, anger, grief, etc. For casual communication, my software would guess at my expression from the sound of my voice. For higher-bandwidth communication, there was a pencil-sized video camera on my computer which could map real-time images of my face onto my tuxedo's head.

I came into the GoMotion reception area wearing an expression of controlled worry. The tuxedo of Leonard, the tech group secretary, looked up at me and activated a roguish-smile expression. Leonard had a damp mustache and a perpetual sunburn. His virtual office was a big loft with clean white walls and skylights showing fluffy clouds overhead. A simmie of Bengt, our virtual prototype for Studly's successor, was purring back and forth, pushing a polisher across the parquet floor. Bengt's neck was a bit longer than Studly's, and his body box had
a slimmer shape. But for his legs he used the same inspired wheels-on-legs hack as Studly.

“Hi, Jerzy,” said Leonard.

“Hi, Leonard. Say, I think some of our ants got loose. Has anyone else noticed?”

Leonard laughed merrily. In his tux laugh loop, he would always touch his tongue to his mustache at the right corner of his mouth, a tic which made him seem both puppyish and devil-may-care.

“Why don't you ask your bad rogue ant for some ID? Dereference a pointer or something.”

“When I picked it up, it bit me,” I explained. Leonard laughed the more wildly.

“It's not funny, Leonard. If the ant is eating and shitting and leaving trails, all my code is being corrupted. It's a wonder I can still see.”

“I'd think you'd be proud of yourself. Roger's been promising us live ants for years, and now that you've been working with him, one of his ants has finally gotten smart enough to break out. Isn't that a good thing, Jerzy?”

“Is Roger here?”

“He's been in and out all weekend. Maybe he e-mailed you the ant!”

“Maybe.” Sending an experimental artificial life-form as an e-mail attachment would be an incredibly careless thing to do, but not wholly out of character for Roger Coolidge. He was a genius-level computer hacker, somewhat eccentric, and imbued with the self-confidence that came from having founded a Silicon Valley startup that had mushroomed to a billion dollars in revenue in six short years. It was an honor for me to get to work so closely with him. Sometimes it was also a pain in the neck.

I sighed, and my computer transmitted my sigh from
my microphone to Leonard's receiver, wherever Leonard really was. Often he was physically at the GoMotion office in Sunnyvale, but several days a week he worked from his apartment down on Market Street in San Francisco. Maybe instead of wearing the gloves and the headset, he was watching me on a digital TV set, talking to me over a telephone, and moving his simmie with a video game joystick. For all I knew, looking at Leonard's brightly cheerful cyberspace simulacrum, he was spending the day in bed with a lover. It was no use speculating. “How's Bengt been doing? Has he banged into the furniture?”

“No. He's smarter than Studly. Look.” Leonard scooped a handful of paper clips off his desk and threw them out in front of Bengt. GoMotion had modeled the laws of physics into Leonard's office, so the little paper clip simmies flew along naturalistic parabolas, bounced on the woodgrain-patterned floor, and skidded to rest.

Bengt had been down on all four wheels pushing his floor buffer, but now he rose up into an alert crouch, balancing easily on his flexed legs. After carefully looking around the room, Bengt wheeled over to stop a few inches from the nearest paper clip and unfolded his pincer-clamp manipulator. Delicately he tweezered up the paper clip and put it in a drawer in his chest. Moving with no wasted motions, Bengt worked his way around the room to pick up all the paper clips before he resumed buffing the floor. The less efficient Studly would have dealt with the paper clips in a one-by-one piecemeal fashion as his floor polisher bumped into them.

“Right on,” I said. “The improvements are thanks to genetic algorithms and artificial life, Leonard. I think Bengt's ready for Our American Home.”

After one of our personal robot models could negotiate Leonard's virtual office, we liked to test it in a
full-size simmie-house that we called Our American Home. We had simmies of a family who supposedly lived there: clumsy Walt and Perky Pat Christensen, with son Dexter and daughter Baby Scooter. They all had blond hair and texture-mapped tan skin, and they all bothered the robots in different ways.

Dexter liked to play pranks. He'd tip a robot over onto its back and drag it to the head of the stairs with a blanket over its head. Perky Pat would give the robots contradictory commands, “Now follow me, and stay right where you are. Hurry, dammit!” Baby Scooter was a sullen blob who would nap on the floor, waiting to see if a robot would bump her or nip her so she could scream bloody murder. Sometimes Walt got “drunk,” and Perky Pat got “totally wired,” and they would lurch and spazz around, doing their best to trip over the increasingly wary robot simmie.

The tests in Our American Home were crucial, as the possibility of personal robots injuring someone was the A-number-one factor that had kept them off the open market in the past. Although if there were accidents, GoMotion's position would be that they were only selling kits and software for the Veep robots—rather than the completed Veeps themselves. If your robot screwed up, it was your fault for having built it. So far this type of defense had held up against people whose Iron Camels had crashed. Our kits came with “no explicit or implied warranty of merchantibility or fitness for a particular purpose.” Even so, the Veeps had to be very safe and very good if they were going to sell well.

My work at GoMotion was to try and use artificial life evolution techniques to improve the programs that controlled the Veep. Once we had the specs for a new prototype, instead of actually building it out of wires and metal, we would generate a simmie of the thing and test
it out in cyberspace. Roger Coolidge had been one of the first fully to exploit this great corner-cutting trick. He had used it to design the Iron Camel. Being something of a bullshit artist, in the most Midwestern kind of way, Roger had dubbed his trick “cybercad.”

CAD stood for
computer aided design
; most architects and engineers were using CAD instead of drafting tools. The idea behind CAD was to draw a three-dimensional computer graphics model of, say, a fan blade before you built it. Someone gave you a blueprint for a fan blade and you made a digital data base which in some sense was the blade. You could generate graphic views of it from every angle, zoom in on its details, take cross sections of it, calculate its weight and volume, etc. Cybercad meant pushing all this a little farther; in cybercad you could pump in virtual air, spin the blade, and measure the net blowage.

The funny thing about the “cyber” prefix was that it had always meant bullshit.

Back in the 1940s, the story went, MIT doubledome Norbert Wiener had wanted a title for a book he'd written about the electronic control of machines. Claude Shannon, also known as The Father Of Information Theory, told Wiener to call his book
Cybernetics
. The academic justification for the word was that the “cyber” root came from the Greek word for “rudder.” A “kyber-netes” was a steersman, or, by extension, a mechanical governor such as a weight-and-pulley feedback device you might hook to your tiller to keep your sailboat aimed at some fixed angle into the wind. The practical justification for the word was contained in Shannon's advice to Wiener: “Use the word ‘cybernetics,' Norbert, because nobody knows what it means. This will always put you at an advantage in arguments.”

When I wanted to get a feel for one of our Veep
simmies, I would set my viewpoint so that I could see through the robot's eyes and move its parts with my own hands. I wore the robot-model like a tuxedo, and I drove the robot around in cyberspace houses. No actual robot and no actual house—just an idea for a robot in an idea of a house. I would try and figure out what was right and wrong with the current model. If I noticed a problem with any of the hardware—bad pincer design for instance—I would go into cyberspace and use a Makita Visual Regrammarizer to change the geometry and back-propagate the changes to make a new set of specs.

Once I had a good knowledge of the kinds of things a particular robot could do, I would pull back to try and write software that could drive it around without me being “in” it. And then, I might need to change the simmie to make it work better with the new software. This process would take dozens, scores, hundreds, or even thousands of iterations. The only way to make a profit was to do as much of this as possible in virtual reality. Cybercad!

Even with the use of cybercad, the process still wouldn't have worked if each iteration involved human judgment—for then it would have taken too long. So GoMotion was using artificial life techniques to make the evolution happen automatically. The way I'd applied this to the Veep was to look at the kinds of changes that the other programmers and I had typically been making to the code. I'd been able to cast our repeated program changes in terms of 1347 different numerical parameters that we were tweaking and re-tweaking. So now the problem of making a good Veep became the problem of finding good values for those 1347 mutually interacting numbers. To do this, Roger and I had run a process of simulated evolution on a population of a few hundred simulated Veeps that we'd installed in a virtual suburb of
Our American Homes, each home with a different Veep but the same virtual family consisting of instances of Walt, Perky Pat, Dexter, and Baby Scooter Christensen.

Some of the badly parametrized virtual Veeps did things like get stuck in a corner and buff the floor so long in one place that they made a hole, or wander outside and get lost, or kill everyone in the house and burn the house down. These were parameter sets to get rid of.

Other virtual Veeps did better. The way our simulated evolution worked was to replace the parameters of the bad Veeps with parameters derived from the good Veeps. Thus the good Veeps were able to “reproduce” onto the space opened up by deleting the bad Veep parameters. This made for a kind of natural selection.

Initially none of the Veeps were anything like perfect, so our evolutionary process often did little mutations to the good parameters that it copied. And there was a way of splicing parameter sets so as to “sexually breed” a successful pair of Veeps. Generation by generation, the process felt around in the vast search space of all possibilities.

After a few quintillion machine instructions had flowed by, we'd gotten something like a good design. The evolution of artificial life!

When GoMotion would get a combination of software and simmie that seemed to work well, they'd order up the parts and build a material prototype of the thing, like Studly.