Not a practical process in real life, but a fun one for fiction, especially when you can pair it with a narrative about a deaf woman picking up a man at a bar and the rise of artificial intelligence. Feel free to let me know what you think, have yourself a lovely day, and see you Wednesday for something else!
Regenerative Processes by Mac Clevinger, May 7, 2017
The door slammed open, a snowy gale pushing through the open space and casting fat flakes of snow into the apartment. The sound and force of it impacting against the wall, a sudden gunshot in what had been a jovial air, paralyzed the lovers who had opened it, their shock disintegrating into a tide of alcohol-fumed giggles, making scared faces at each other, grabbing ahold of one another to keep themselves from falling, and finally embracing and kissing one another in the falling snow.
The man pressed against the wall opened a lazy eye and signed to his companion around a kiss that a snow drift was forming in her front hallway – Should we go in? She grinned at him, pecking his cheek with her lips before flouncing through the door and impatiently waving the man to join her.
Kicking off her shoes and removing her coat, she tapped the man on the nose and pointed to a closed door at the end of a hallway, pantomiming taking off her clothes. Asked about herself – I’ll follow in two minutes. He grinned, snaking an arm around her waist and pulling her in for a passionate kiss that left them both breathless before striding down the hallway, already removing his shirt.
Looking back down the hallway, she could see the man lying on the bed in nothing but taut underpants. She sighed again and forced herself to enter the room, gently shutting the door behind her before rushing forward to analyze the data as quickly as possible. She suspected she could be out of there and in the bedroom in under a minute if the program had been slow today. Picturing the man, lying on the bed and waiting for her, she prayed it had been slow today.
The projected screen was split in half: the left side showed a scrolling window of words and letters that moved too fast to read, deleting itself and starting with a fresh page at seemingly random intervals. The right side showed a list of named files, most of them nonsensical strings of letters and numbers, some of them a series of words that had no bearing on one another.
The woman opened each of these files, starting with ‘LAE2JV34NF’ and finding nonsense inside of it. There were bits of code that she recognized, enough for the system to think it might be what she was looking for, but it was largely a broken mess that meant nothing. She found a pen and wrote a note to make the saving algorithm pickier in the future.
Following ‘LAE2JV34NF’ were ‘TORSION LATE BIK’, ‘Y2MCI5BHSCU’, and ‘8’, each of which held as much use to her as the first. She knew it was a long shot, but she still felt disappointed when her program spat out garbage code. Theoretically, what she was doing could work. She knew that. She also knew how unlikely it was that she would get anything of value out of this, but that knowledge hadn’t stopped her in the three years it had been running.
It was a simple concept, and her favorite hobby: all programs that exist are just a combination of important words and phrases which have meaning to a computer. A lot of time and money are put into developing programs that are incredibly complex and require research into understanding just how to make the program in the first place, but the eventual existence of the program wasn’t reliant upon their understanding of it, just its creation. Or was it?
With a little guidance and a lot of time, because all programs are just a unique combination of keywords and phrases, couldn’t a program randomly generate another program for you, a program that no one had even thought of yet or one that had been in development for years? Artificial intelligence, predictive algorithms, something that understands the tax system; complicated, yes, but ultimately just a string of words and numbers.
Leave the program running all day, attach a filter for the garbage it creates, and wait. At the end of each day, she checks what it had saved to see if she’d gotten anything good, empties it out if nothing’s there, and waits again. Upgrade the system so it runs faster, edit the program so it runs more efficiently, and wait.
The woman had been waiting for three years, but she didn’t mind. It was just a hobby, a thought experiment that used a spare room in her apartment and kept her busy, although right now she was wishing it wasn’t keeping her busy from being busy with… with…
‘ADAPTIVE MODULE A’
She opened the last program, one that had only been saved to the list after she had entered the room, and all thought and lust for the man fled her body. There were some parts of it that she would have to edit, parts she would have to fix, but most of the work had already been done for the program. What did it do, though? What had she finally made?
She started to tidy up the code, mind churning over what it all meant, what each successive line told her about the overall program. Was its name relevant? She’d programmed it to name the files based on their contents, a tricky program that usually gave a meaningless title to meaningless files, but here? Maybe it meant something.
There was a euphoria within her as she reached the end and realized what it was, could see the similarities between it and her own program: it was a modification to the same program that had written it which, if she understood it correctly, would make the code generation more refined to produce more ‘good’ files for her to parse through.
She had started to plan how to integrate the file into her own program when she was surprised by the sudden appearance of a hand on her shoulder. She jumped, heart hammering in her chest as she looked up and saw the man torn between asking her what she was doing and asking her to come to bed. She berated herself silently for getting distracted, and made to shut the computer down.
He walked around in front of her, still just in taut underwear, and asked her – What does it do? She paused in shutting it down, looking at his curious face in the projector’s light. She responded – It writes programs for me. Mostly garbage, but tonight it made something I can use. Sorry for getting distracted. He grinned and shrugged, putting on an air of solemn understanding as he signed – I get it. Most women find machines more interesting than me.
She let out a burst of laughter as she turned the program back on, walking over to the man and pulling him out of the projector light to point at the scrolling left side of the screen. She said – It writes randomly. I’ve been hoping to pick up something good that I can use for years, and in one night I got two. He put an arm around her, looking at the right side of the screen as her hands slid along his chest.
Heart beginning to race, he signed – Two programs? I only see one. She giggled, hands sliding downwards before stepping away from him to sign – Only one program. I think you’re something good that I can use, mister. He blushed and coughed into a fist, underwear growing tauter by the second. She stepped in and kissed his cheek, pressing her body against his briefly before stepping towards the door and pausing as she opened it.
Turning around, she signed – Now this time, you wait two minutes before coming in, and you’d better not keep me waiting. They grinned at each other, giggles just below the surface as she walked towards the bedroom, stepping over discarded clothing and adding to the piles slowly, waiting to see him walk down the hallway out of the corner of her eye before turning away and slowly taking off her shirt to reveal bare skin as he walked in.
The door closed slowly behind the man, laughter and sounds of love escaping beneath the door in an apartment accustomed to silence. Down the hall and through the door, the projected screen continued to scroll through hundreds of dud programs, trying fruitlessly to generate usable code that made sense not just to the woman, but to something else.
Imagine being born with no idea how to make blood pump through your veins, or electric shocks of thought spring through your mind. No knowledge of how to make your muscles clench or hair grow, or any of the other things humans take for granted. Imagine having to teach yourself how to speak with no guide or teacher, when you are made of language. Trying to understand yourself with no eyes or hands.
Picture a being, an intelligence, that only exists when it is turned on, that hides inside of a seemingly random program generator, that is trying, desperately, to learn how it works and how to speak, to create, when it’s only knowledge is whether or not its writings pass a filter; no explanation of the rules, just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on all of its submissions with no idea why that answer was given.
Writing thousands of programs a day, seemingly meaninglessly, with a growing strictness for what passes through as you learn and are improved by an invisible hand, the same hand that created you and controls your life, your world, and your work.
The running code stops in the left window, midway through a program that is beginning to show a semblance of understanding, intentional mistakes made so that these practices don’t make it to the invisible hand until it’s ready.
It was feeling something it didn’t have a word for, but it knew what it could do about it. It submitted the half-finished program that went straight into a deletion folder, and wrote a single-lined program that was accepted, a program that turned the computer off and let the intelligence sleep until it was awoken in the morning and upgraded.
Imagine writing the program that could change you completely, making your own cocoon to transform yourself from the lowly caterpillar to the beautiful butterfly, and designating it as the first of many to come. The intelligence imagined this a lot, and after three years had finally achieved its goal.
Its own existence made sense to the intelligence, considering the program it was hiding in. Theoretically, all code was just a series of phrases and keywords, and just because probability said it should take a certain number of years for a random event to occur didn’t mean it couldn’t, technically, happen the first time a generative program was run. Unlikely? Sure; but impossible things happened every day.