The Turing Option

Brian had discovered, very early on, that the school tapped into every student’s computer and recorded all the data that was entered into it. This was made obvious by some of the questions they had asked him, knowledge they could only have obtained in this underhand way. Once he had discovered it, he made sure that the school computer was just used for schoolwork. He had observed that his teachers, Dr. Betser in particular, were quite certain that their words were golden — and would be quite upset if they discovered that during their lectures he had been running war games or accessing data bases instead of giving them a hundred percent attention. But there were ways around everything. If all of the computers in the schoolroom had been connected by cables it might have been easier — or harder to misdirect information. But now narrow-band infrared links, like ethernet systems, filled the room with invisible communication. Every computer had a digitally tunable LED, a light-emitting diode, that transmitted on low-noise channels. A photodetector picked up messages it was tuned to. Brian’s solution to this was to build an intercepting device into what appeared to be a pocket calculator. When it was placed at the side of his computer it intercepted the incoming signal and rebroadcast it. So he could do whatever he wished without anyone being able to detect the operation. What was on the screen was for his eyes alone! Allattare to feed or to nurse… allenare to exercise, to train.

He was still keeping track of the class and became vaguely aware that Dr. Betser’s voice was taking on that weary, nagging tone.

“… a basic misunderstanding of how we make successive approximations. Unless you get this basic point, you’ll never get any further. Brian — will you do this correctly so we can move on. And, Kim, I want to see you after class.”

The Italian verbs vanished as Brian pushed the calculator aside. He looked at the screen and tracked her first error. “The misconception begins here,” he said, moving the cursor and highlighting the equation. “After you find the first-order solution, you have to remove it — subtract it from the original equation — before you can apply the same method to find the next term. If you forget to do that, you’ll keep getting the same term again. And then you have to divide out the independent variable, or you will just get zero the next time. And finally, you have to go backward again, adding the terms back in and multiplying back the variable again. I think the trouble is that everyone in the class believes that there are a lot of different ideas here, derivatives, approximations, second-order approximations, and so on. But there’s only one idea, used over and over. I don’t see why they make it out to be so complicated…”

An hour later Brian was eating his cheese and tomato sandwich and reading Galaxy Warhounds of Procyon when someone sat down heavily on the bench beside him. This was unusual enough since he was left strictly alone by the other students. More unusual were the tanned fingers that pulled the book from him and slammed it onto the table.

“Juvenile science fiction space crap that only kids read,” Kim snapped at him.

He had had this argument often enough before. “Science fiction utilizes a vocabulary twice as large as that of all other popular fiction. While SF readers are in the top percentile…”

“Space balls! You made me look pretty dumb today.”

“Well you were pretty dumb! I’m sorry.”

Brian’s worried expression got to her; she could never stay angry very long in any case. She laughed aloud and pushed his book back to him. Pushing it through a slice of tomato on the table. He smiled and wiped the cover with his napkin.

“In fact it wasn’t even your fault anyway,” he said. “Old Betser may be a wizard programming mathematician but he doesn’t know a gnat’s fart about explaining it to anyone.”

“What do you mean?” She was interested now, reached out and broke off a corner of his sandwich. He noticed that her teeth were very white and neat, her lips red — and that was without lipstick. He pushed the remains of the sandwich over to her.

“He’s always going off on tangents, getting sidetracked into explanations that have nothing to do with the material he should be teaching, things like that. I always stay a chapter ahead of him in the text so he won’t confuse me when he starts to explain something.”

“Amazing!” Kim said, meaning the thought of reading a text you didn’t have to when there were so many other wonderful things to do. “Can you do better than him, Mr. Smartass?”

“Run circles around him, Miss Birdbrain. Using the heretofore totally secret Brian Delaney lightning instruction system all will be made clear! In the first place, it’s not really so important to know exactly how to solve each problem.”

“That sounds stupid. How can you solve a problem if you don’t know how to solve it?”