Creatures great and small - digitized

Many things are more concrete in their seeming than in their objective reality. Lovelace's friend, Mr Babbage, recently visited in some irritation; a street musician had insulted his numerical pedantry (not to mention questioning his legitimacy) when he argued that the new millennium begins with the year 2001 rather than 2000.

Lovelace could offer him little solace, believing that the millennium lies more in human minds. Whatever the reality, calendar mathematics is overwhelmed by our perception (no doubt influenced by Analytical Engine displays) of the instant when the digits cascade to 2000. And yet this powerful moment is illusion rooted in one cultural system, meaningless against the vast history of the cosmos.

Still, unwillingly, Lovelace has been drawn into the millennial mood. She feels an urge to look forward and backward, as if this arbitrary date were a meaningful cusp. In this frame of mind, for example, she watched a BBC televisual series "Walking With Dinosaurs". Through Analytical Engine graphics, this project brought Mesozoic fossils to an illusion of life in Lovelace's own Holocene parlour. Despite some scientific reservations, one central achievement remains: the animation exposed fallacious assumptions, producing a new biomechanical understanding.

Giant long-necked creatures swung their heads horizontally for efficiency, tails not tripod supports but counterweights. Grounded pterosaurs folded their wings for a stilt-like strut. Marine reptiles swam, limbs in beautiful counter-phase, with a land-born walking rhythm.

Lovelace found this virtual resurrection of the ancient and huge a pleasing balance to the modelling of the new and minuscule 'nano-machines' of which Babbage is so fond. Even its failings serve as a caution for futurologists using similar methods. These great saurians also serve as reminders of mortality, of the vastness of time, and of the strangeness and ubiquity of the phenomenon of life - a phenomenon soon to be joined by various digital, mechanical and cyborg intelligences.

"In the beginning was the Word". Lovelace has always been enchanted by the image behind that resonant Talmudic vision: that a creator breathed one vast, vibrant word and the information therein crystallised the universe from chaos. When we take the role of creator, the word is small and digital, breathing life into correspondingly small silicon universes. Looking from our invented millennial gateway, however, Lovelace does not feel that the ambition or reach of the word has in any way changed.

A fossilized warning for the digital world

Lovelace was amused to read of Hallucigenia, one of the denizens of the early explosion of bizarre Cambrian species found in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. This animal, it was thought, walked on fourteen jointless spines and sported a row of stubby tentacles on its back: until a better specimen revealed that palaeontologists had the creature upside-down! We may smile, but this shows how easy misinterpretation can be, when we meet unprecedented biology.

This problem may arise, too, when we begin to encounter digital life. Can we trust our perception of its possibilities? The growing uses of digital life-forms show striking parallels to our treatment of organic creatures: for exploitation, study, amusement, artistic and scientific inspiration, modification for supposed aesthetics, and so on. Yet it seems that the caucus of civil servants and scientists, whose speculations on Internet life-forms so exasperated Babbage recently, failed to see these parallels. They talked, for instance, of extermination. Yet in the organic world, as experience with DDT and the mosquito testifies, this measure hardly has a track record of success. Far more species, indeed, have been eliminated by accident than by design.

Conversely, decision-makers seem equally incapable of applying to real-world biology the understanding of genetic processes given us by digital life. As the Digital Burgess Conference shows, the Burgess Shale is inspiring to firms such as BT, who hope to evolve real-time systems from a diverse ‘digital soup’. Artists, too, delight in exploring a medium open to boundless mutations. The mutability of such models should, however, sound a note of caution over real-world genetic modification.

A world populated with creations such as a bean with a scorpion gene may well represent a new analogue of the Burgess Shale. This system is no longer stabilised by aeons of unmitigated competition: new mutations can be leap-frogged past initial risks to compete in fully established form, and will probably cross-breed with unmodified forms. We may be on the threshold of a world in which neither digital nor biological life follow evolutionary paths predictable from past patterns.

Human beings are notoriously slow to learn the lessons of the past. Lovelace fears that we are destined to repeat, in both digital and biotechnological arenas, the mistakes of our own ecological history.

Modern interfaces for old senses

Even as Lovelace considered Mr Babbage's distaste at the interpenetrations of silicon and flesh, she read of the current work of Dr Roy Bakay of Emory University, Atlanta. This neurosurgeon's team has pioneered vitreous brain implants enabling paralysed patients to send cursor commands directly to an Analytical Engine.

Lovelace was already amazed at advances in surgery, such as two years ago when a young friend had a severed foot reattached and was walking within months. More surprising still is the recent transplant of a complete forearm onto a patient who lost his own a quarter century ago. Such miracles highlight the brain's marvellous capacity, even limited by its inability to regenerate central nervous tissue, to reconnect and reroute.

Vladimir Ulyanov (better known as Lenin) once told his followers, "If an individual dies, so do his cell and its neighbours; but the organisation remains and will talk around the wreckage". This seems a universal principle, recalling how the Internet routes around damage (or censorship). The brain too follows this logic, as we may read in Dr Oliver Sacks' wonderful accounts of the adaptations of patients in overcoming neurological disasters.

The human mind, as Babbage noted, can accept diverse and simultaneous input through its natural senses. Its very generality, however, extends to novel connections. Finding that a motor neurone cluster moves a screen cursor rather than a now-useless toe, the brain adapts to the new tool. Nor need its architecture be mapped in detail. As experience of cochlear implants shows, given a multi-electrode contact in the appropriate region, the brain rapidly learns to use the unfamiliar 'interface'.

In a world with such neural interfacing, fictional fantasies will inevitably move to everyday implementation. Futurologists at BT's Martlesham laboratories suggest that complete human 'souls' will be copied to backing store (an idea pursued by novelist Mr Greg Bear through his Eon cycle). More prosaically, and a nearer prospect, a subset of a person's expertise might be copied to control, for instance, an industrial plant.

Such machine entities, fragments of thought transplanted to electronic containers, cannot be human: but their adaptability will survive and operate in inconceivably new forms as ... something else. Perhaps they will merge or cross-fertilise with artificial software entities, or with the progeny of Rodney Brooks' robotic creations? Extraordinary vistas indeed, for minds designed for foraging in the forest margins of a tropical rift valley.

Media fall along the path of progress

Over the summer break, Lovelace found time for leisure reading, and was much moved by Mr Keith Roberts’ alternate-history novel Pavane, a haunting work of speculative fiction recalling the timeless Wessex of Thomas Hardy. Her friend Babbage, however, was far more interested in its technical merits, and praised one section, The Signaller, for its accurate depiction of a mechanical semaphore network.

By Lovelace’s adulthood, semaphore stations had been superseded by the electric telegraph, now gaining just recognition as a precursor to modern data communications. This autumn, Walker & Company publishes The Victorian Internet by Mr Tom Standage, which explores how telegraphy caused its own radical ‘information explosion’ in the last century.

The electric telegraph was, however, built upon earlier techniques. Lovelace was fascinated to read an online book called The Early History of Data Networks (http://www.it.kth.se/docs/early_net). The authors, Dr Gerard J Holzmann and Professor Björn Pehrson, discuss communication by beacons, mirrors, flags and mechanical semaphore chains. They find, by the early 1800s, the basics of modern digital data transfer protocols, such as ‘handshaking’, data packets, route encoding, and error checking. It seems, as Ecclesiastes reminds us, that “there is no new thing under the sun”.

But such continuity is by no means inevitable. Even over the last decade, the dominance of the digital Analytical Engine has progressively driven out analogue methods in telephony, musical reproduction and television. From the dawn of written history, the road of progress is littered with such ‘dead media’, a term coined by science fiction author Mr Bruce Sterling, who has created an excellent historical compilation at "http://griffinmultimedia.edu/~deadmedia/". We may find the Incas’ knotted-wool quipu, cuneiform, floral codes, or the wax-cylinder gramophone quaint compared to a hard disk or a burst of telemetry data from a deep space probe. But all media are conceptually identical in carrying packets of data, and the dead may shed light on the living.

Lovelace is very much in sympathy with the view of Soviet historian Mr Roy Medvedyev, that we can learn as much of our destination from the road by which we arrived (and even from the turnings which we did not take) as from our present position. Asking why, in the past, we took one path and abandoned another, why we opened this gate and not that, can be a valuable mirror on the present.

The Web: science or 'green ink'?

This month finds Lovelace in a reality-doubting mood again, this time concerning the World Wide Web. By allowing contacts no longer limited by social credentials or geography, the Web agrees with Lovelace’s free-wheeling and curious spirit. Yet it carries new uncertainties. How does one trust who and what one finds?

The problem is not merely personal. Lovelace, misled by the amusing Robokitten picture, assumed April’s “artificial brain” story to be a seasonal hoax. Not so: a Web search revealed the artificial intelligence researcher Dr Hugo de Garis to be very much real. Proof, however, was not straightforward. Unfamiliar with AI hardware, Lovelace was unable to judge the technical credentials on his Japanese home page. Ultimately, she sought evidence of peer review, and took his name on prestigious AI conference lists as conclusive.

Lovelace found the experience depressing. On venturing beyond her own specialism, she had immediately to fall back upon the scientific world’s conventional reliance on restricted social interaction. This system has always seemed to Lovelace inefficient, nepotist and inherently subject to ossification. Nevertheless, it undeniably worked on its own terms; similar monopolies on communication have upheld socio-political hierarchies throughout history.

It is the modern view to applaud democratisation of access, but when anyone can publish, how do we identify trustworthy material? In the words of Polish scientific visionary Stanislav Lem, "truth can rebel against censorship, but what is to be done when it is drowned in a universal hum of spurious half truths and falsehoods?"

Judging real science is hardly clear-cut. Babbage, after all, took nearly two centuries to be vindicated; but his friend Mr Andrew Crosse, who once dined in Royal Society circles, is now thought a crank. Most checks are provisional. We have to assume that self-published pages may be promotional. We can watch the typography for the electronic equivalent of the rant in green ink, and other critical routines exist. See, for example, Mr Russell Turpin of the University of Texas on characterising quack theories (http://public.logica.com/~stepneys/sf/quack.htm).

While such rules-of-thumb may only echo Lovelace’s prejudices, they can be checked against the reader's common sense. But with medium and message advancing almost daily into the unknown, we cannot always rely on experience. It seems we must evolve novel procedures for validating identity and information, or the Web’s communicative power will always be weakened if we can only trust people we already know.

Engineering the friendly face of data

At the risk of readers thinking her under the influence of laudanum, Lovelace must admit to recently asking her colleague a strange question: “Are you real, Mr Babbage?” He raised an irascible eyebrow, wrinkling his brow and shifting uneasily. "I'm sorry," he said dryly, "I don't understand. Could you phrase your question in a different way?" Lovelace found the exchange highly disturbing, for Babbage was indeed unreal.

This false Babbage was a prototype ‘human-form software agent’ she saw at a small R&D group concerned with applying Analytical Engines to means of communication with expert systems and databases. The explanation seemed prosaic enough; Babbage’s screen image had been analysed frame-by-frame from hours of video conference recordings. His mannerisms had been identified and related to causal events, so that the Engine could call upon them, with random and subliminal variations, to create a lifelike ‘avatar’ that answered Lovelace’s typed queries. Nevertheless, these facts failed to dispel fully her reaction.

Lovelace tends to scoff at those who invest emotion in Engine constructs, such as the admirers who have proposed marriage to Kyoko Date, the fictitious Japanese cyber-celebrity. This encounter, however, impressed Lovelace with the power of the human face to communicate data, and more.

Analytical Engines have problems understanding faces: despite the existence of a handful of commercial applications, an Alta Vista search on “face recognition” reveals this as a field still very much at the research stage. But to humans, the face is a ready-made information-rich communication device, which our eyes and brains are already tuned to read. From simple beginnings in representing multidimensional data as cartoon ‘Chernoff faces’, such face representations could provide a powerful and intuitive means of communication between scientists and software.

At present, the concept is in its infancy; the false Babbage would not have convinced Lovelace for long. But how long before Engines can completely mimic a person's presence, with any required informative or emotive effect? A friendly face to data is one thing; but might we not also be duped by cybernetic sales staff, engineered to present every visual cue we interpret as trustworthiness? Or be tormented by irate cyber-watchdogs warning us of poor performance? Lovelace is left with a sense of confusion, like the Velveteen Rabbit in Mrs Margery Williams’ classic children’s story, whose first question was “What is real?”

Pocket universes and the origins of Creation

How little do things change! Mr Babbage was always delighted by ingenious Japanese toy automata; and on Lovelace’ last visit, she found him engrossed with a Tamagotchi, evidently overcoming his earlier fear of electronic swarms. Unable to elicit conversation, Lovelace turned to the radio, where she heard that the Vatican reputedly plans to computerise "the search for God's fingerprints in the chaos of Creation".

What would count as an unequivocal find, given the tendency of our assumptions to obscure the view with our own fingerprints? Even the devoutly religious amongst Lovelace's modern-day friends express doubts at "the feasibility of quantifying God". But all are intensely interested, expecting at least collateral benefits from the exercise.

The premise for the search recalls the 18th century theologian William Paley’s ‘argument from design’: that a complex universe implies a more complex creator. Past searches have tended to fixate on the hardware of Creation, such as the wondrous engineering of the human eye. In Babbage’s time, Darwinism was the reply to Paley, and so it remains today, even extending to Professor Lee Smolin’s elegant theory (see his book The Life of the Cosmos) that the fundamental constants of the universe - seemingly tailored to our existence - may also have evolved Darwinistically.

In the software field, scientists such as Adrian Thompson, at the University of Sussex Centre for Computational Neuroscience, mimic and examine the origins and evolution of intelligence and of life itself. Tom Ray’s celebrated Tierra program, too, has shown that life-like complexity may evolve - a community of hosts, parasites and meta-parasites - in a simple world of competing programs.

Even in the mundane sphere, such ‘pocket universes’ afford their operators God-like powers. Banks and credit card companies watch for fraud by comparing our spending patterns with our model analogues inside their corporate Analytical Engines. The disease transmission vector models of the World Health Organisation and the Disease Control Center in Atlanta help prevent global pandemics, while meteorological bureaux watch for digital signatures of storms to give advance warning. Other Engines monitor virtual aircraft, ships, cars, and even Babbage’s beloved railways, helping guard against disaster.

Whilst creation itself remains beyond our compass, Lovelace feels that, with Engine-enhanced vision, we have started to take responsibility for phenomena which were formerly blamed on ‘acts of God’. Perhaps the Vatican will find not fingerprints but departing footprints.

Lightning calculations make fractals practical

Lovelace’s memory was jogged by Babbage’s recollection last month of their inventor friend Mr Andrew Crosse. She remembers fondly her visits to his Somerset home, Fyne Court, with its orchards festooned with wires to harness atmospheric electricity: one of the experiments that earned him the epithet ‘Wizard of the Quantocks’. Mr Crosse, she feels, would have approved of the contribution of Analytical Engines to the study of aerial phenomena, from everyday lightning to the ‘sprites’ and ‘jets’ newly observed in the upper atmosphere above thunderstorms.

This subject engaged Lovelace’s mathematical curiosity recently, when she read of the work of Juan Alejandro Valdivia at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; his computed models of the electromagnetic disturbance of lightning bolts assume a conductor with the spiky branching form known as a Diffusion Limited Aggregate fractal.

Ever a devotee of arithmetical beauty, Lovelace admits to a fascination with such engine-generated shapes; indeed, she feels that she is due some recognition for having anticipated fractals. The sight of a program creating the opium-dream arabesques of the Mandelbrot soundly confirms her prediction that the Analytical Engine would weave algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

While Lovelace’s interest in fractals derives largely from aesthetics, she expects that Babbage will find more sympathy with their growing practical use. Until recently, fractal theory was largely directed toward mathematical explanations of natural forms: for instance, tree branches and roots; blood vessel and bronchial networks; geological folds and cracks; or the surface of abraded materials at microscopic level.

Now, however, they are finding application in generating tangible and useful structures. Amalgamated Research Inc. of Idaho, USA, manufactures space-filling fractal conduits, similar in shape to the branches of the cardiovascular system. Designed to minimise turbulence, the many rootlike outlets of such an ‘engineered fractal cascade’ (EFC) can draw or inject fluid simultaneously throughout a mixing vessel.

Another company, Fractal Antenna Systems Inc., is developing a branching ‘Fractenna’(tm) for hand-held telephony or for networks of portable Engines. The details are as yet concealed by commercial considerations, but, its makers tell us, this highly efficient sender and receiver of electrical waves will be no bigger than a small coin, tiny even compared to the conventional wand antennae that would have so amazed Mr Crosse.

Hidden landscapes revealed in colour

Lovelace recently had cause to chide Mr Babbage for his failure last month to attribute correctly the phrase "raining floppy disks" to its creator, Mr Richard Dawkins. Babbage claims distraction by a street musician, but Lovelace is more inclined to attribute the lapse to his advancing years.

Inspired to musings on the passage of time, Lovelace was speculating on how differently the great archaeological excavations might have proceeded, had there been access to modern geophysical equipment. At Nimrud, Layard employed dozens of workers in digging trial trenches to trace walls that nowadays could be mapped with a magnetic or resistivity survey. J Turtle Wood took seven years to find the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, following, by intuition and more digging, the temple road buried under 25 feet of alluvium: a situation where now cart-mounted ground penetrating radar (GPR) excels.

However, whilst geophysics provides us a magical eye for seeing into the earth, presentation of its findings is frequently lacking in impact. Lovelace was interested to hear of the Computing Archaeology Research Group at Staffordshire University. Led by Mr Mike Fletcher, the Group uses personal Babbage Engines to interpret and display geophysical data in a fresh and visual form.

One benefit is the Engine's power to explore the relationships between data gathered by different techniques. For example, correlating magnetic and topographic data can distinguish true underground data from that due only to undulations of the terrain. Beyond this, Lovelace found highly appealing the scope of Engines to attractively display archaeological results.

One striking example is the depiction she saw on the Group's World Wide Web page of a resistivity survey of the Hindwell Enclosure, a prehistoric farm site in Clwyd. No dull contour map this, but a three-dimensional model rendered by Engine and green-painted to resemble a field. The domains of low resistivity - the silted hollows of the surrounding ditch, a quarry, and a run-off channel - appear as dips, thus recreating the enclosure as a delightful imaginary landscape.

This is no idle prettifying of numbers. Such techniques, Mr Fletcher argues, aid the appreciation of results by the onlooker, and can only be an improvement when the publication of geophysical findings in archaeology is often still in the 'map and lantern-slide' format of the lectures Mr Babbage found so tedious in his time at Trinity.

Communal efforts free scientific minds

Lovelace was recently reminiscing with her friend Babbage about the early days of their collaboration. “It must be a very pleasant merry sort of thing to have a Fairy in one's service,” she wrote, amused at the thought of Babbage taking his ease in London, while at Ockham Park she hurried to revise and post him the latest explanatory Note on the Analytical Engine.

This seems a most pleasant analogy to the widely-publicized work of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home (SETI@home) project. Daily the Arecibo radio telescope generates some 35 gigabytes of data, which requires complex Fourier analysis. The inspired idea of the SETI@home organisers at UC Berkeley, USA, was to recruit users of personal Engines throughout the world to help with this immense task. Each user downloads a ‘screen-saver’ that busies itself with analysing blocks of radio data whenever the owner is idle (perhaps, as Lovelace recalls writing of Babbage, “feasting & flirting in luxury” over dinner).

So far, the 600,000 users have together logged 8600 years of processing time: a remarkable achievement! Babbage, as is his wont, lectured Lovelace on spare processor cycles, redundancy, and massively distributed parallelism. Lovelace felt that he was missing a broader observation: SETI@home is a move away from local computing toward wide participation by anyone who is interested. It foresees a society whose very fabric would sustain the processing of scientific information. With such resources, scientists could focus immediately on a project’s intellectual aims, not the hardware investment forced upon anyone who must process data alone. A further effect could be wider scientific literacy and democratic, cooperative science - even an end to novelist CP Snow’s division between the ‘Two Cultures’ of art and science.

At present, this is still a dream. Studying Usenet newsgroups, Lovelace found that talk of SETI@home centred on the technicalities of bandwidth and work-units, sometimes degenerating into frank boasting of Engine speeds. Such competition, it has to be admitted, is central to the unusual success of this project. Its web site publishes league tables, and encourages groups to compete in processing the most data. Lovelace fears that a competitive urge may be inevitable human nature; but SETI@home certainly shines as a model for harnessing this trait toward a communal scientific effort.