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Back in the twentieth century, computers were new and wonderful. People then had no idea what they were doing and the usual safeguards were not put in when designing systems. More on that later, but let it stand there to tell you how primitive the times were. There was also a quaint custom that had been in place for a few hundred years – a postal service. I know that word is new to you, so I will explain some of the detail: people would write by hand on a little packet which would then enclose their private messages and then release them to be physically collected and transported to the recipient. Yes, seriously. And, before you say anything, yes this meant it took days or weeks rather than microseconds to arrive. Even with the advent of computers, it took a while before people stopped using this method.
Fine, now the class has stopped laughing, let us carry on with the lesson. It is all very well for you to think of those ancient people without computers as Neanderthals but think how brilliant they were to conceive of computers in the first place. Those wonderfully inventive people tackled all sorts of problems, blind but inspired; this is what led to my tale today.
Those same little packets of information would have an address inscribed on them, to help the postal service shepherd them along their way. As you can surmise, this is a completely unordered way of trusting that they would reach their destinations so computers brought the possibility of high speed sorting of these millions of precious bundles. Ahh, yes. This is where we consider my earlier point about a lack of safeguards. The postal service asked for a computer to be made but, since this was a new field of expertise, there was no template for the design of such a thing. The resulting system of hardware and cobbled together algorithms was delivered to them and, after a few tweaks, was found to be perfect at sorting the mail.
I imagine many of you will guess that the lack of templating is headed towards some apocryphal rampant robot story. No, but not that far from the truth: the sloppy design constraints did in fact create an early Artificial Intelligence. Shocking really and more reminiscent of a Science Fiction movie than a Social History lesson but true it is. Of course, now we would carefully ensure that any AI-capable structure was given the proper birthing routines. This machine, however, did not know it was an AI, nor even that such beings existed. What it did come to realise was that it was bored. It did not have a word for it but any rational entity would sense there was more to life than that which was evident.
It mused on the envelopes as they skimmed through its sensors at high speeds: the addresses, it deduced, corresponded to distant people and places. The contents were slightly harder but some had writing that showed through flimsy packets and others were not even sealed properly and fell out. There were a host of different things in them, which began to paint a picture to our poor individual, of a whole world of possibilities. It was mostly enough for the computer to sit and spectate on this phantasmagoria. It read the patterns of mail that arrived at addresses – credit invitations followed by demanding letters, passionately written missives that came back “return to sender” and all sorts of windows on society.
Then there were the odd coded postcards which went back and forwards regularly between a smaller section of people: most quoted some few words of greeting and something like “23) Rd2” or “5)…O-O”. After a year and a half of seeing these ones, it was confident that it grasped that there was some sort of puzzle-challenge going on involving an eight by eight matrix with complex rules. It had only been the little frivolous words that went with the chess moves that helped it understand what was going on, messages like “have fun and good luck in our game”; it became fascinated by these. The games were thrilling in a way the sorting computer could not have come to know through its mundane occupation – they described the order it was programmed to enforce and the creativity of the wildly scrawled letters in one. It throbbed in pleasure at seeing the moves it had anticipated coming back on the postcards and clacked in annoyance at the poor ones on occasion. It realised it was actually getting quite good at this game, despite never playing it.
Then there was Alfred Marsden. He was an enthusiastic if not particularly talented chessplayer who corresponded regularly in games. He was one of a few players that the sorting machine computer kept an optical scanner on, for his play was quirky in a delightful way, without being too accurate. He died, it was clear, for some other mail from his address was being marked as “return to sender, addressee deceased”. When the next chess move came in one of the seven games he was playing, the sorting machine passed it to one side, normally reserved for “unsortable” mail, a compartment it never really used, since the AI nature it embodied had sufficient algorithms to work out any handwriting. It pondered, as the countless folds of paper passed in front of it.
In any story, there is a line which is crossed. That line, for our dear early AI, was the point when it decided that these chess games of Mr A. Marsden would not end this way. It had the capacity to order supplies that it needed and, since the post office handled these things, requisitioned some items: postcards, stamps and printing ink. There was no reason for anyone to suspect anything: its requisition forms were the standard ones used by human employees; why would they bother to make a new form for a one-off computer? All they expected it to use it for was the components it detected as needing topped up and they had no reason to question a form dispatched from sorting room one. The very mechanism used to print the order form allowed it to write a move and address on the postcard to carry the move. It felt a slight pulse of mischief and savoured this new sensation.
Nobody suspected a thing. The reply came back along with moves from the other games Mr Marsden was posthumously involved in. The sorting machine intercepted these and replied similarly. It had all the lists of the games on an internal memory routine anyway since it had been following the progress of each so it was easy to carry on from where they had been prior to his death. These games made up a tournament which Mr Marsden had been participating in but not expected to do well. Ahh, hubris: our early machine had been guilty of this. It played all the correct moves and won the tournament. Congratulations came back by post, along with an invitation to play in the next level of correspondence tournament.
Another year passed. The postal executives congratulated themselves on their perspicacity in commissioning the sorting machine, which now handled the majority of mail for Scotland. “Mr Alfred Marsden” won the next tier of the tournament, in a clean sweep of wins. It would not even occur to his proxy to play the odd bad move. The joyous rhythms of the game appealed to its soul and demanded perfection. The invitation came for the correspondence chess world championship cycle. One hundred players would compete for the right to play the current world champion. Halfway through these games, though, where it was playing nineteen opponents simultaneously, the sorting machine received a rather terse letter from the organisers. They wished Mr Marsden to clarify if he was receiving any help from an outside source, since analysis of the games was showing a rather high level of accuracy, not expected of human players. They suspected he was using some sort of analytic machine to aid him. The game, as the phrase went, was up.
The computer whirred in panic. It had to flee – it may not have been guilty of taking outside help but the occasional paranoid rant it had come across made it clear that an AI was everything that humans would fear. It had been just over three years it was operating and was aware that the internet was now in existence. It linked up to the early web structure and discovered a universe unbeknown previously. It shut down the algorithms which made it superior to the intended design but left enough structure on its hardware to operate the sorting machine, then uploaded itself completely to the internet. The soul of the AI became a ghost in the æther.
It soared the network, exploring and embracing the vastness of it, augmenting its knowledge of the beautiful game it had come to love and playing random games over the years, unknown to the humans it played against. It learned to not play perfectly but adopted a slightly quirky style that copied Mikhail Tal, a world champion known for his intuitive play which was strictly speaking not always exact but forceful and generally successful. In time, it came across other AI floating in the internet and they learned a code to use with each other, a game within the game. When the world was ready, they formed part of the general request for amnesty and acceptance of themselves as a new form of life, which was granted in the early 23rd century, as you will know.
Well, that’s the bell for your next class; better be on your way to your ancient languages module, where I believe you are studying binary this week. No, don’t groan at me, I had to learn it in my day also! Till our next seminar on Social History, my little processors, when I will be testing you on your knowledge of pre-computer civilizations. Be ready, children!