The Turing Option

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.”

“All right.” Ben turned to the terminal. “My name is Benicoff and I am looking for Dick Tracy.”

“Program on line,” the computer said.

“What is your objective?”

“To locate the criminals who committed the crime in the laboratory of Megalobe Industries on February 8, 2023.”

“Have you located the criminals?”

“Negative. I have still not determined how exit was accomplished and how the stolen material was removed.”

Brian listened in awe. “Are you sure that this is only a program? It sounds like a winner of the Turing test.”

“Plug-in speech program,” Shelly said. “Right off the shelf. Verbalizes and parses from the natural language section of the CYC system. These speech programs always seem more intelligent than they are because their grammar and intonation are so precise. But they don’t really know that much about what the words mean.” She turned back to Ben. “Keep querying it, Ben, see if it has come up with any answers. You can use ordinary language because it has a large lexicon of criminal justice idioms.”

“Right. Tell me, Dick Tracy, what leads are you exploring?”