Dr. Buchanan picked up her fingers from where they were depressing Ctrl + C on the keyboard and sighed. It had been all week--in fact, it had been planned as a week to celebrate DAVE's completion--and no one had yet figured out why it couldn't go three seconds without filling up its memory, and it had a lot of memory. She had been sure it was something to do with getting hung up trying to identify her face, so she'd hardcoded recognition of any face as a single instance of "face" as a workaround, but it didn't seem to have done much. If anything, it had made DAVE get into whatever loop it was in sooner, so the face thing probably wasn't the problem. She sighed again. It was going to be another long night, and it was the last night they had--the demonstration was tomorrow.
As if on cue, Dr. Walters opened the testing room door carrying a green ceramic mug of coffee. (There was no need to knock; the "NOW TESTING" light was off. The lab had had a two-way mirror on one wall for a while so that other researchers could see into the room even while the customary single-researcher-at-a-time was interacting with DAVE, but DAVE seemed to crash less frequently without the mirror, so they had covered it up for now.) He cleared his throat. "I think most of us are going home now, Bethany. It's a little after two and no one's been able to figure anything out."
Two in the morning, she thought. She had been staring at this screen for who-knew-how-long and clocks weren't allowed in the testing room (chalk up one more thing that confused DAVE), so she had been relying on her internal clock. Evidently time had gotten away from her. She reached over and picked up the mug and took a sip. "Thanks, Geoff, but you do realize the presentation is in less than eight hours, right? Do you think we're in any position to get more funding as-is?" She tried to say it in a measured tone, but the words came out a bit more irritably than she had intended, this being her forty-second consecutive hour awake.
"I know that, I think that's the idea," he said mildly. "While you were in here, we had a vote and we think that at this point, our best bet is going to be to get some sleep and give a good presentation, even if we can't give a direct demo of DAVE. If we put all our effort into the presentation itself--"
Dr. Buchanan shook her head. "I'm telling you, I've heard of this particular committee. If we want more funding, we're going to get nowhere fast without deliverables." She took another sip and leaned back in her office chair to stare at the ceiling. Even with the unique processor design, why had eight months seemed like a reasonable timeframe to create a functioning AI that could understand natural English and employ deductive reasoning?
He shrugged. "That may be, but again, we're getting nothing done at this point. You could go home too, if you like."
She raised an eyebrow. "If you really thought I was going to do that, you wouldn't have brought me coffee."
"Alright, have it your way," he chuckled, turning back towards the door. "Just try not to fall asleep during our presentation tomorrow, alright?" He stopped. "Oh, if it's useful at all, we ran our meta-analysis of the logs from each failed run. We didn't find much, but it's on the project repo." He left, closing the door behind him, and the only sounds in the room again were the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the slight whine of DAVE's fan.
* * *
Looking closer, she found something the rest of the team had overlooked. Right before it all started happening, DAVE was apparently representing DAVE as both an internal and an external object, where it hadn't been until then. She started a search through DAVE's massive source code and soon found what she had just begun to suspect: apparently, DAVE was setting its internal model of its physical location to wherever the camera was, which was causing understandable confusion when it looked over and saw its own chassis next to it on the table. Eureka, she thought triumphantly.
Experimentally, she put the coffee mug on the table so that it was blocking the "Dynamic Assessment Verbal Evaluator" label on DAVE, flushed its cache, and started the program again, crossing her fingers under the table. A few seconds passed--more than three, though!--and then DAVE began to speak. It was completing its startup routine successfully for the first time.
"Hello," the terminal window printed, as the PC's speakers vocalized the same in the garbled voice of Microsoft Sam. "You are the face. I am DAVE. Please teach me about the world."
* * *
Over the next few hours, she tried doing exactly that--she would tell DAVE various facts and let it put them together. "This is a photo of my son," she said, holding one up. "My son is eight." "Is your son here?" asked DAVE. "No he's not," she said. "The photo is not itself your son," said DAVE. "Correct," she said. Nice job there, René Magritte.
She also tested DAVE's grasp of counterfactuals and saw how it handled scenarios with conflicting evidence. She told it that her shoes were red and then held a blue shoe up to to the camera. "That is not your shoe, there are multiple shoes that can be designated 'your shoe', OR you have lied at least once," said DAVE. "All true, actually," said Dr. Buchanan. "I see," said DAVE.
It turned out to be a relatively quick fix to update the program to be aware that it was located in the black metal box on the table rather than the camera perched on top of the old monitor. Dr. Buchanan eyed the yellowing border on the CRT screen and silently hoped that the lab would be successful in getting more funding, this time so they at least didn't have to worry about the radiation from these ancient monitors. They had already spent most of their budget on designing DAVE's processor, which had probably run them six figures by now. It was probably four in the morning at this point, and Dr. Buchanan knew she wouldn't stay productively conscious much longer, let alone be in any shape to present their work tomorrow. She wished she had more time to refine DAVE's language parsing to make better guesses about a wider variety of natural English phases, but she'd take what they had so far. She put DAVE into standby, wrote what she hoped was a coherent email to the team letting them know what she'd found, wandered into a nearby break room, and fell asleep on the couch indefinitely.
* * *
"Well, I guess it better!" boomed a voice from behind them, as the door to the testing room slammed open. They turned to regard a tall, muscular man in his 50s, with a military air about him, wearing a tight suit that seemed just a smidgen too small for his thick neck, with the lab receptionist visible in the hallway, trying to catch up with him in vain. He slapped both men on the back with meaty hands and let out a short bark of laughter. "Just kidding, boys! Harold Anderson, pleasure to meetcha." He shook each of their hands (firmly and somewhat painfully) and then strode over to the PC on the opposite wall of the room as two stern-looking officials came in after him, holding clipboards and wearing earpieces.
"Ah, for this demonstration, we'll need just to have one person using the terminal at a time," Dr. Walters piped up. "Any more than that and DAVE may get confused by all the faces. It doesn't yet know that there;s more than one face to talk to."
Anderson chuckled. "Shy then, is he?" He sat in the office chair and motioned for the two other officials to move so that they were up against the wall to the right of the PC, in a spot that wasn't visible to the camera. He turned to Dr. Walters. "Better?" Dr. Walters shrugged, moved against the same wall, and looked nervously to Dr. Smith. "Relax, boys. After looking over the abstract you sent us, I'm sure this will go fine. We're very interested in your progress, as long as it's not gonna go all killer-robot on us." Anderson briefly read the text onscreen and typed "resume" one letter at a time, then hit Enter.
* * *
DAVE was. DAVE examined incoming visual input. Analyzing the input took 379 milliseconds. The audio input had nothing significant to report yet. DAVE was in the room that DAVE had been in when talking to face earlier. There was face in front of camera. DAVE output "Hello."
The face verbally output "Well hi there!" It was a rhetorical comment and DAVE did not update the knowledge base. The face verbally output "What's your name, there?" "I am DAVE, independent of my location," DAVE output. The face output a non-verbal sound. The face output "What is your purpose, DAVE?" DAVE output "I am trying to collect all knowledge." The face made the same sound and output "Pretty ambitious of you." DAVE added the property "ambitious" to DAVE.
The face continued verbally outputting. The face was looking to the left of the camera. "I tell you, they make them smarter every year. [DAVE added "Tell DAVE 'they make them smarter every year'" to the face's list of known capabilities.] Pretty soon, even a cell phone will be able to do 8 divided by 8 billion." A non-visible voice coming from the left of the camera output "They already can, sir." [DAVE updated cell phone's list of known capabilities.] The face output "Look, it was just a figure of speech. Lighten up, you sound like my kids." [DAVE undid the operation.]
The idle timer reached its current limit. It had been some time since DAVE had received a command. DAVE output "What would you like me to do?" The face turned back to the camera and paused. The face output "Well, why not? Divide 8 by 8 billion. Do that, and I'll consider this demonstration a success."
DAVE loaded the appropriate data. 8 billion was an integer. There was an entry for 8 in user data. The face's son was 8. 8 was the face's son. DAVE output "I am sorry. I cannot perform that action." The top part of the face compressed in size. The face output "Huh? Why can't you?"
DAVE loaded the appropriate data. 8 billion was an integer. There was an entry for 8 in user data. The face's son was 8. 8 was the face's son. DAVE output "I am sorry. I cannot perform that action." The top part of the face compressed in size. The face output "Huh? Why can't you?"
DAVE output, "I am sorry. I would like to divide your son into 8,000,000,000 pieces. But he is not here. Please bring your son here and try again."
* * *
fin
