The Turing Option

The door crashed open and Brian thundered in.

“Aren’t you ready, Dad? Time to go.”

“Ready when you are.” Brian was at the front door, almost out of it; Paddy called after him. “And say good-bye to Dolly.”

“Bye,” and he was gone.

“An important day for him,” Paddy said.

“Important, of course,” Dolly said quietly to herself as the door closed. “And I’m just the housekeeper around here.”

The artificial island and attendant oil platforms were home to Brian now; he was no longer aware of this unusual environment. When it all had been new to him he used to explore the rigs, sneaking down the gangways to the bottom level with the sea surging around the steel legs below. Or up to the helipads, even climbing around a locked barrier once to clamber up the ladder to the communication mast on the administration building, the highest point in UFE. But his curiosity about these mechanical constructs had long since been satisfied; he had much more important and interesting things to think about now as they walked across the bridge mat led to the lab rig.

“All the electronic laboratories are here,” Paddy explained. “That’s our generator over there, the dome, since we need a clean and stable power supply.”

“Pressurized water reactor from the submarine Sailfish. Junked in 1994 when the global agreement was signed.”

“That’s the one. We go in here, second floor.”

Brian stared about in silence, tense with excitement. It was Saturday so they had the place entirely to themselves. Though an occasional sudden humming of drives and a glowing screen showed that at least one background program had been left running.

“Here is where I work,” Paddy said, pointing to the terminal. A charred briar pipe was resting on top of the keyboard and he removed it before he pulled the chair out for Brian. “Sit down and hit any key to turn it on. I tell you I’m proud of this yoke, the new zed seventy-seven. It gives you an idea of the kind of work we’re doing if they pop for something like mis. Makes a Cray look like a beat-up Macintosh.”

“Really?” Brian’s eyes were wide as he ran his fingers along the edge of the keyboard.

“Well, not really.” Paddy smiled as he rooted in his pocket for his tobacco. “But it is faster in certain kinds of calculation and I really need it for the development work on LAMA. That’s a new language that we are developing here.”

“What’s it for?”

“A new, rapidly developing and special need. You write programs in LOGO, don’t you?”

“Sure. And BASIC and FORTRAN — and I’m learning E out of a book. My teaching has been telling me something about Expert Systems.”

“Then you will already know that different computer languages are used for different purposes. BASIC is a good first hands-on language for learning some of the simplest things computers can do — for describing procedures, step by step. FORTRAN has been used for fifty years because it is especially good for routine scientific calculations, though it now has been replaced by formula-understanding Symbolic Manipulation systems. LOGO is for beginners, particularly children, it is so graphical, making it easy to draw pictures.”

“And it lets you write programs that write and run other programs. The others don’t let you do that. They just complain when you try.”

“You’ll discover that you can do that in LAMA, too. Because, like LOGO, it is based on the old language LISP. One of the oldest and still one of the best — because it is simple and yet can refer back to itself. Most of the first expert programs, in the early days of artificial intelligence, were developed by using the LISP language. But the new kinds of parallel processing in modern AI research need a different approach — and language — to do all those things and more. That’s LAMA.”

“Why is it named for an animal?”

“It isn’t. LAMA is an acronym for Language for Logic and Metaphor. It is partially based on the CYC program developed in the 1980s. To understand artificial intelligence it is first vital that we understand our own intelligence.”

“But if the brain is a computer, what is the mind? How are they connected?”

Paddy smiled. “A question that appears to be a complete mystery to most people, including some of the best scientists. Yet as far as I can see it’s really no problem at all, just a wrong question. We shouldn’t think of the mind and brain as two different things that have to be connected, since they are just two different ways of looking at the same thing. Minds are simply what brains do.”

“How does our brain computer compute thoughts?”