Self-discovery

In general, if you think about it, the founder of this tendency has to be considered not Dr. Ashby, but the now — forgotten director of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, who (in order to create ominous rumblings in the crowd scenes of Boris Godunov) first ordered each extra to repeat his home address and phone number. But Ashby has posited solving the reverse problem. We take noise — the surf, the hiss of coal dust in a mike, anything — and plug it into a machine. From the noise chaos we extract the largest “splashes.” This gives us a pattern of impulses. And impulse patterns are binary numbers. And binary figures can be changed into decimal ones. And decimals are numbers: for example, the numbers assigned to words in a dictionary for machine translation. And a collection of words is a sentence. Of course, for now, the sentences are varied: false, real, abracadabra — informational raw material. But the next cascade will have two streams of information — the kind that is intelligible to people, and this raw material. Then operations of comparison, coincidence, and noncoincidence — and everything nonsensical is filtered out, as is the banal. Then original new thoughts, discoveries and inventions, the works of unborn poets and writers, philosophical thoughts from the future appear! A thinking computer!

Of course, the respected doctor did not explain how to perform this miracle. His idea is embodied only in squares connected by arrows on a piece of paper. In general, the question of how to do it is not highly esteemed in academic circles. “If you remove yourself from the difficulties of technical realization, then in principle you will be able to imagine….” But how can I remove myself from it?

Well, enough whining! That's why I'm an experimenter, in order to test ideas. That's why I have a lab. The walls give off the smell of fresh oil paint. The air conditioner hums. New instruments shine on the equipment shelves. Vessels and jars with reagents sparkle in the cupboards, and colorful piles of wires and soldering irons, their points still red and uncovered with scale, wait for me. Apparatus, neatly wrapped in plastic, sit on the counters — and their pointers aren't bent yet and their scales aren't dusty yet. Dictionaries, textbooks, reference books, and monographs are arranged on the bookshelves. And in the middle of the room, glistening in the January sun, stands the TsVM — 12, the automatic digital printer, with lacy, multicolored wires in the crystal unit. Everything is new, unsullied, unscratched, and everything exudes the wise, rational beauty developed by generations of craftsmen and engineers.

How could I not dream? And what if I succeeded? Actually, for myself, my dreams were much more modest: not of a supercomputer that would be smarter than man (in general, I'm not crazy about that idea, even though lama systems technologist), but of a computer that would understand man, the better to do its work. Then that idea seemed possible to me. Indeed, if a computer can exhibit definite behavior based on everything that I tell and show it, and so on, then the problem is solved. That means that it has begun seeing, hearing, and smelling through its sensors in the purely human sense of these words, without quotation marks or explanations. And then its behavior could be adapted for any work or problem — that's why it's a universal computer.

Yes, then in January, it all seemed possible and simple; the sea was only knee — high. Oh, the inspirational quality of new equipment! The fantastic green loops on the screen, the confident hum of the transformers, the crackling of the relays, the blinking of the lights on the panel, the precise movements of the arrows and pointers…. It feels as though you're going to measure everything, conquer it all, do it all, and even an ordinary microscope inspires the confidence that right now (with a magnification of four hundred and double polarized light) you will see something that no one else has ever seen!

Why even talk about it? What researcher hasn't dreamed at the outset of a project, didn't imagine handling the hardest tasks? What researcher hasn't experienced that overwhelming impatience when you're rushing — hurry! hurry! — to finish the boring preparatory work — hurry! hurry! — plot the course of the experiment, and get on with it?

And then. and then the everyday lab worries, the everyday mistakes, the everyday failures break your dream's spirit. And then you're ready to settle for anything, just so that the whole thing wasn't a waste.

That's what happened to me.