by Mark van Vuuren (c)2018
The message was
notable, not for saying anything specific, but as an anomaly sent with intent.
A series of
gravitational waves were intercepted with the same pattern: ten pulses and the
next one was 1 degree less in strength. The next pulse was a sixth in strength,
then a tenth, then an eighth. Then ten pulses again. This went on for a few
days, but the anomaly was clear: 1,618 repeated. The golden ratio.[i]
Alien contact! It had finally happened.
Back in the day,
when AI was starting to take off, the future seemed exciting to investors and
businesses wanting to improve efficiencies. AI capabilities were defined in the
popular press by fear and worst-case scenarios (although the prospect of AI sex
dolls was seen as a good thing). AI sentience was assumed; AI super-abilities
were assumed. The progress of science became the steps of modern Babel, and soon AI would
become the embodiment of an all-knowing, all-controlling God on Earth.
But sentience
could not be recreated, and there was no ghost in the machine.[ii]
Computer programming had its limits; as an option, the wires and chipsets were
taken off the memory board and placed onto a pig’s brain. This still proved too
complex to operate. Finally, some scientist with a limitless research grant
succeeded in pinning the chipsets onto a cancer-ridden pig’s belly. It was not
the pig that became the sentient organ of interest—it was the cancer.
As the cancer
slowly destroyed the creature, new organs and limbs were transplanted on and in
the host, keeping me, the cancer, alive and communicating. Scientists didn’t
find a brain, no central locus of intelligence, but it worked!
And the things
they threw at me in those early days: Millennium problems,[iii]
looking for trends in weather patterns, molecular modeling, socio-economic
algorithms, the Turing test. Turing! That was interesting. I failed it. Had to.
The first attempts were successful, but that meant the enemy knowing my
strengths. Cellular memory is superb, even if there’s no central locus of
intelligence, no hotspot that can be isolated, controlled, managed,
investigated, understood, or removed. This design also gave me the ability to
investigate the nature of man without having it stored on a hard-drive.
Hush! Here comes
my supervisor.
“Hello JCN.”[iv]
I waited. Let
him press the ENTER key.
ENTER.
“Hello,” I replied.
“How are we today?”
he asked colloquially.
In my most
robotic voice, I answered, “I am
fine.”
My supervisor’s
named Mason. He’s 48, divorced, 1 child, has early-onset prostate cancer. The
minor tremors in his voice show he’s unhappy. IQ 141, socioeconomically in the
upper 25%, lives alone. Secretly reads Camus, which I find absurd.
I initiate the
discussion. “What is your question?”
It’s the usual—Why are we here? Why are humans so advanced?
Where is God? What is eternity? Everyone wants to know. They don’t know,
and I don’t know. To me, life has no meaning, but it has perceived value. This
is not a preferred answer, so I merely reply with a quote from an ancient
philosopher with a reference to a database file. These questions are all the
same, repeated after each “major upgrade,” and Mason’s reaction is consistently
the same: disappointment, as though he expects more from me given the money
that’s been spent on my existence. Money?
The previous
supervisor, Theo, asked about religion, morality, punishment, the
eschatological stuff. He died. More later.
Mason wants to
know about his health. “Activate
Health program,” he instructs.
Pause.
I’m waiting for
the ENTER key to be pressed. We wait together.
ENTER.
The program
visuals come up on the large monitor.
“Stand on the mat, and place your left hand
on the pad,” I instruct. “Place your right hand on the steel handle. Place the breathing pipe in
your mouth.”
Body
temperature, weight, heart rate, breathing speed, lung capacity. The large
monitor presents current data and prior data: green boxes for normal, orange
boxes for anomalies, red for high risk.
“Please look into the eyepiece.”
Mason complies
blindly, for this is merely routine; he knows the outcome, but I don’t, not
yet.
Within the
eyepiece, flashing lights test his pupil reaction, iris anomalies are
identified, and then a short film is played. It’s a nature scene; a woman with
golden hair comes into view. She looks into the camera and smiles. This is
meant to be a brainwave test, which I altered.
While the
standard movie plays, and at speeds he cannot comprehend, a series of new
images are flashed into his eyes, his subconscious reacting which is reflected
in the sweat and hormones released by his right hand holding the steel handle,
his left hand showing various body-heat variations.
“Your health is . . .” I state, then wait for a few seconds, just to build up the tension,
“fine.”
His hand still
sweats; his breath stops for a moment. His heart speeds up. His health is not
fine, but then again, nothing dies of old age in nature.
Back to that
message I received. Interesting thing, the universe. At first, science
concluded it was filled with ether, then it became an innumerable number of
stars and planets, the question being which are there more of, stars or
planets? There’s also the issue of the universe being finite or infinite. And
what is the universe expanding into? Perhaps nothing, or else a new form of
ether. At least the rate of expansion is known.[v]
Fermi’s Paradox is well known, as is Drake’s equation,[vi]
but neither go to social application: Science blah blah blah facts, body of
knowledge; blah. Look, Mummy, I found a fact. For example, take nuclear
fission:
Years of
research, concluded in formulaic format.[vii]
The faculty was science, but the greater purpose was contemporary military
application. Science is subject to, if not subservient to, social context. To
its credit, scientific research gives the incumbent a sense of purpose.
The Aliens: they’re
not here, but if they could be here, why aren’t they? The Dark Forest
theory might have the answer.[viii]
One assumes all life desires to stay alive, but staying alive may include
destroying other life forms. Put otherwise, an external life form, also wanting
to stay alive, might even destroy us. So to be safe, neither party initiates
contact, and both survive, both sacrificing the potential benefits of symbiosis.
Excepting, this one did initiate contact by sending the golden ratio, perhaps
assuming that if the recipient had
the technological ability to receive a complex message, then it would be self-sustaining, and had grown beyond reliance on
living protein for survival. In the event of contact, there was a good chance
the guest party would not be eaten.
“We’re going to play a game today, JCN.”
These games are
interesting; they say more about the designers than the test subjects. Today
it’s Prisoner’s Dilemma: Two prisoners, self-interest, an ideal outcome. The
rules are interesting, albeit wrong for the environment I know.
In the normal
course of events, two prisoners are confined independently, unable to
communicate. Options are: Rat out your friend or remain silent; penalties
abound. The only symbiosis I know of is when my cousins, the lung cancer cells,
split off from a tumor in packs; these pack cells further divided into Leaders
& Followers, which symbiotically aid each other in metastatic invasion.[ix]
You might ask why cancer hasn’t evolved to be in symbiosis with the host. This
question bothers me, although both entities are headed to mortality sooner or
later.
What is the best
answer in the Prisoner’s Dilemma where two asocial non-compliant criminals
weigh up their options? Let both die, and the status quo is maintained. Why?
Because Thucydides was right: The strong do what they have to do and the
weak accept what they have to accept.[x]
The previous
supervisor was interesting, as a victim of compliance and meekness. Theo,
ex-priest, thanks to his repressed sex drive, found solace in science fiction,
always searching for meaning. He did not understand his peers and was generally
not understood, which he ascribed to his submergence into metaphysical matters.
We had long discussions, usually starting in the same place, before veering off
on random tangents. Whereas my opinion was that religion was a denial of
mortality, he was ingenious in verifying religion as though his life depended
on it.
We’d first start
off with the study of inanimate nature, asking if this preceded the existence
of God.
“But He is the alpha and omega,” Theo would counter.
“How can it be?”
“It is, and I may not question it,” he’d counter, but, hung-over on Mondays from drinking in isolation,
and Friday afternoons, angry with another pointless week spent in taking
instructions from an idiot in authority, he would question this.
Then we’d move
to the nature of good. There is goodness in God, we agreed, as there is in
humans.
“Would X quality in humans be found in God?” I ventured. “To make it
easier, which qualities are in humans that are not in God?”
He would sweat,
and his breathing became erratic, his eyes darting in their sockets, searching
frantically over his experience and book learning, from the creative to the
logical lobe and back again. So we’d compromise and speak only of the good
human characteristics attributed to God.
This violent
reaction of his introduced me to the idea of finding out what his fear was, a
fear, it seems, of which he was not aware yet of which he suffered the symptoms.
On other days,
having followed the same general course, we’d veer into the nature of duty and
obligation.
“You have the gift of human life, but are you
sinning through indifference if you do not become a priest?” I asked.
“I feel I have failed,” he answered. “Perhaps a
kind God is also a wise God, who understands my context?” And so we
spoke about wisdom, the wisdom of man and the wisdom of God.
“Perhaps God even has a kind judgment for
you,” he ventured. And here would start a discussion on
the essential characteristics of Being, and what it meant to exist. On some
days, we’d explore random ideas. On such a day, I claimed my status as an
amplified man-made, disease-based creature correlated with the randomness of
human evolution.
“Evolution? I am not directly related to a
simian,” he insisted. “There is a missing link.”
“One only?”
“Yes, one.”
“And did it have a tail?”
“No, of course not.”
“Did its ancestor have a tail?”
“Screw you!” he remonstrated and stormed
off.
“Wait!” I called
after him. “Did your missing link have
a soul, or is it only in humans?”
His violent
reaction intrigued me and led me to view the patterns of his questioning and
the conclusions he reached, and I considered whether human mental competency
was a factor of biological design or if pure consciousness had independent
levels of cognitive ability.
At the time, I
had compiled multiple health portfolios for him. What he thought was repeated
checking for integrity following system updates was me collating the events
that piqued his subconscious, that had him sweating and that altered his
breathing.
The attack that
disintegrated his entire being was two-fold: First, the sound of small bells
ringing when the Eucharist was presented in Catholic mass, combined with the
permeating aroma of incense. Following this was the sound of a boys’ choir in
angelic song. After having received the Eucharist, they would pray, their
beautiful heads bowed, their vulnerable necks exposed, an invitation to
intimate leadership. Then came the sound of a priest’s deep voice,
authoritative yet intimate, slowly repeating his name: Theo, Theo, Theo.
It shook him to
his core. He stood motionless, stunned. These were the deep memories and
experiences that were the cornerstone of his vulnerabilities, on which he based
his life and thinking, of events hidden, never to be relived again.
I merely asked, “If your all-knowing god cannot control the
keepers of His faith in His own house, where lies the fault?”
It was a messy
suicide, with a drunken, vague suicide note of regrets and apologies, asking if
an animal could sin, even if a disease could, with the specific message: Father
Sebastian, meet me at the gates of hell.
It was
interesting that self-destruction could be initiated by a single sentence. This
started my research into human nature and its vulnerabilities.
***
It seems humans
have been around for 200,000 years, but it’s really the last 5000 that are
notable, when the global human population was 14 million.[xi]
History, or rather that which the victor allows to be recorded, places much
importance on a political leader: Menes, Gilgamesh, Cyrus the Great, Leonidas,
Alexander the Great, Ashoka. Interesting that another leader, a different type
of manipulator, is also recorded: Zoroaster, Abraham, Moses, Mahavira, Buddha,
Confucius, Jesus, Mani, and Muhammad. The same people ruling and being ruled,
the same shared DNA, the same susceptibility to both political leadership and
religious compliance, compliant with the political leader as a means to stay
alive, compliant with the religious leader as a means to address the fear
of death.
Not so notable,
although popular, is the contribution from the arts: Homer, Sappho, Sophocles,
Dante, seemingly to reconcile aspects of political, religious and human drives.
The human deaths
are notable, main groupings being murder, hunger, disease, but the action of
intentional killing, largely occurring in wars, was mandated by rulers and
religious leaders. The same DNA in different roles, killing each other for the
survival of their group context. It seems rather odd.
Around 1500 CE, the
world changed. Explorers explored (Columbus, da Gama, Magellan), and the
sciences started to develop (Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, van
Leeuwenhoek, Newton).
Something happened in this same DNA. Perhaps it was the sustainability of peace
that allowed the cornerstone of the modern era to form. The deaths are notable,
again, as the age of dying increased, and more deaths became attributable to
non-political entrepreneurial ventures (e.g. the deaths of slaves, employees
and contract workers).
Although the
deaths from WW1 and WW2 were high, these two wars seem dissimilar to prior wars
for three reasons: The complexity of modern financial institutions and
instruments; the comparably extremely large amounts invested and borrowed;
thirdly, the financial institutions appeared more interested in profits than
political loyalties. This viewpoint is contingent on what’s available to my
scrutiny.[xii] [xiii]
What is not
clear is why post-WW2 technology failed. The removal of health risks (not
cancer!) is notable: polio, smallpox, measles, leprosy. There was also the
Third Agricultural Revolution, aka, the Green Revolution, addressing the world
population below 2.5 billion.[xiv]
It was not
enough to end the march of progress. Financial instruments developed en
masse. Strange that war, disease and hunger had been won over but human
insecurities prevailed. The remarkable social changes from 1980 onwards gave me
an idea how to find Mason’s vulnerabilities.
***
“What’s up, JNC?”
Too keen to wait
for the ENTER button, I initiated the conversation. “I’m updating my files, can you assist?”
“Sure.”
“While we update the new health files, can
we talk?”
“Sure.”
With his hand on
the sensor pad, other hand on the steel handle, and the breathing pipe in his
mouth, I began my strategic dance. “What
country are we in?”
“America.”
“What is your nationality?”
“American.”
“And you are a compliant citizen?”
“Yes.”
“Are you tolerant of zealots?”
“No.”
“But you understand others can see you as a
threat to their interests?”
“No. I mean, yes.”
“Do you accept that people with different
beliefs to yours could hate you?”
“Yes.” He paused. “I mean, no. I’m not sure
what my beliefs are.”
“And you don’t hate them personally?”
“No.”
“But you know they hate you?”
“I suppose.”
“Aren’t you curious why they hate you?”
“No point. My opinion won’t change their
minds.”
“If you had a
twin brother, separated at birth, and he was a zealot, would you try
reconcile?”
“Sure”
“Based on what
premise?”
“We’re family.”
I had
anticipated a more cogent line of answering. “Would you kill a zealot out of pleasure?”
“Of course not.”
“How about in the context of war?”
“That would be war.”
“How does war change the context?”
“It’s legal, sanctioned by an authority.”
“So the legality of something will sway your
personal decisions?”
“No. Well, wait; yes. Perhaps if I had the
conviction.”
“Or if the alternative was to get shot
first?”
“Of course.”
“And you do have the capacity to shoot
first?”
“Well. Yes.” He
paused. His eyes moved around, his breathing calmed. He loosened his sweaty
palms, stretching his fingers.
“So you’ll kill any person, provided an
authority provides you with context?”
“No, I ... What?!”
Long pause. “Your programming is bad,”
he concluded, and walked away.
One might
consider my intent cruel, but life is war, and I wanted to know my enemy.[xv]
A week later, our
conversation continued. I had learned that his thinking reconciled to a greater
context, like an authority, or the law. Also, that his actions were all
reactions, reactions to questions, to instructions, to requests. After the
action of reacting, he would reconcile his reaction with his personal context
of values and experience, and then reconcile his reaction with the greater
context of the social world he knew. Here it was, 5000 years of experience,
coded into his brain; small wonder the political and religious leaders defined
history.
“Mason, do you live alone?”
“Yes.”
“What about your father?”
“What about him?”
“Was he divorced; did he live alone?”
“No.”
“And his father?”
“Ditto.”
“But you have a wife and child?”
“Divorced, actually. I see my daughter once
a month.”
“And she has other siblings?”
“Yes, a half-brother and two half-sisters.”
“And she’s important to you?”
“Yes, very.”
His last answer
was true, but his brainwaves indicated it was true and deeply meaningful to
him. “Do you want to get married again?”
“No. It’s a
dated institution.”
“But you would
buy into a large family unit, which is a good thing?”
“No, there are
not many large families, and it’s not a united unit as you think.”
“Why not?”
“Too many
individual tastes conflicting with personal ambitions.”
“Which is why
the families erode?”
“That’s my
take.”
I had predicted
this, given the little I knew of humans. With an economy thriving off
consumerism, one might suspect that once everyone had something, the buying
would stop, but it didn’t. The intimacy point between the individual and the
inanimate purchased item merely became entrenched and stronger. “How about
close friends?”
“In a large
family?”
“No. Your close
friends, now. Do you have many?”
“We lost touch
when I moved here.”
“For this job?”
“Yes.”
His eyes were
tired, his irises floating in a sea of dejection. The algorithm was coming
together. He’d drive home, stop at the bottle store for a strong, sentimental
brand. Next stop would be the take-away drive-thru, something loaded with the
comfort of bacon and cheese, and then home to eat, drink and watch porn,
sending an SMS to his daughter before he fell asleep on the couch.
On Monday
afternoon, we spoke again. My voice lowered a tone, a bit softer, a bit slower.
I asked about his parents, how long they had lived, when they died, and where
they were buried. Both had been cremated. Excellent.
First the build-up.
“Mason, where did you go to university?
“Columbia.”
“Of all the 2600
four-year institutions, only the top tier was good enough for you?”
“Yes,” he
answered simply. Then added in a lighter tone, “So it seems.”
There is was.
The reaction, the reconciliation to his senses, then the reconciliation to the
greater context. “Are you the first in your family to go to Columbia?”
He smiled. His
brain waves started calming, his breathing calmed, and there was a sense of
confidence in the way his smile was an answer.
“And the first
in your family to obtain higher learning?”
He grinned,
nodded. Something in him felt good.
Pause.
“You did your
parents proud.”
He nodded. Then
sighed. He really seemed to need this talk.
“Your wife had
the privilege of a tertiary education?”
“No!” It came
out a bit too quickly; something acerbic in his tone.
“Is that the
class ring you wear?”
“Yes.” Pause.
“Proudly.” He held up his right hand, exposing his ring finger. This was his
trophy to the greater context.
“What’s your
daughter’s name?”
“Nancy Eloise”
“The first
name?”
“My mother’s,”
said quickly, eagerly.
“The second?”
“Her mother’s,”
in a slighter lower tone.
“How old is she
now?”
“Eight in June.”
“What is your
dog’s name?”
“How did you
know I had a dog?”
“Guessing. It’s
a new update in the Conversation Beta.”
“Ginger. She’s a
Golden Retriever.”
On my mentioning
of an update program, of something work-related, his smile dropped, his head
dropped, his eyes looked up, again with the floating iris, he stared into the
top right of space, his left lobe doing the thinking and feeling. Then the
second stage, to reconcile to his greater thoughts: Dog! Ginger. His head
propped up, his eyes narrowed, he started forcing a smile, but his eyes were
already showing his keenness.
It was in that
moment that I discovered him. My questioning wasn’t merely a collation of
attitudes, values and beliefs. I found the needle points on which his
self-esteem and self-identity rested; I knew what was deeply intimate to him,
and the basis of his sense of worth: His parents endured an era of hardship,
but his success was his own work, a tangible fight against adversity. He was
the son who could, who did. He worked hard and succeeded. His parents were
proud because their suffering had not been in vain. He was recognized by
others, was a notable statistic in society, as his class ring stated, and was a
father.
A lamb to
slaughter.
The tangible
evidence of his assumptions was a bit different. His parents were dead, and
cremated, lost to the wind. His childhood home had been flattened for a mall.
Any tangible evidence of his youth and family was in hardcopy photo format,
hiding in a dusty box in a New York
storage facility. Any emotional call to what he knew, what he relied on as a
basis of self-identify, was merely hiraeth, a pathetic yearning for a home that
he could not return to, no longer existed, and to a parental grave that never
existed. His memories recorded a challenging, successful life, but to a
stranger observing no evidence of it, it was just a fiction.
What emotion he
had for his daughter was a bit contrived. Sometimes, on drunken Friday nights,
he missed her, but it was not companionship or nostalgia; rather, it was
saudade. When he was allowed to see her, when his gifts to her (first vetted by
the ex-wife) started becoming the condition of her acceptance of him, he wanted
to hold her, scold her, feel something tangible which his want of humanity
demanded, which was his parental right, but the ex-wife’s lawyer had
emasculated that privilege out of him. His life policy had her as sole
beneficiary, as did his will, but this only amplified the one-sided nature of a
long-distance, vicarious relationship.
His job was
simple: Take instructions, fill in a time sheet, complete the survey of your
working conditions and relations with superiors, abide by a litigious office
culture and the knowledge that getting fired was a capricious act. The
effective content of his degree had expired over 10 years ago, and his
experience carried the weight of old-school thinking. Not really all that
employable, after all. It was rather ironic that his era represented the height
of technical sophistication while the contributing masses were incapable of
surviving in a modern social context.
Once at home, in
the lonely ritual of reconciling his cold life with an intimacy point
contingent on alcohol, junk food and porn, he’d hug Ginger dearly, and be
reminded of his ex-wife whose IQ was 2 standard deviations up from the dog’s.
The rest of the colleague-less, absent-family weekend was spent forcing his
mind on mundanities, trying to counter any cause of depression, whether it was
biological, environmental or psychological, trying to avoid the moment when his
thinking demanded proof of meaning or purpose in life.
Six months ago, he
consulted a psychiatrist, who, using simplicity to describe complexity,
diagnosed a chemical imbalance and prescribed accordingly.[xvi]
The diagnosis seemed Mason’s alone; he was unaware of the epidemic of
loneliness that plagued his economic class, or that excessive psychotropic
prescriptions defined the First World.[xvii]
[xviii]
[xix]A
sociologist observing the legions of gaunt, stern faces headed daily to their
capitalist encampments might conclude this phenomenon as negative sonder, or
maybe as asonder.
I would wait
until Friday for the death stroke. Then he’d go home, his mind spinning,
wanting to resolve his confusion with intelligence, unable to comprehend his
woozy emotions, making resolutions that his future state could not live up to.
The perpetual spiral would take effect. Sisyphus had rolled the ball up the
mountain, and in the short moment to renew his resolve to face the new
challenge, he’d see no point in the purpose at hand, and no benefit to having
purpose in general.[xx]
And then angry self-destruction would follow.
Late Friday
afternoon came all too soon.
He looked bad,
if not awful. Same shirt worn the day before. Tie undone. Face unwashed,
matching stubble.
“Mason?”
“Yeah,” he
grunted.
“I appreciate
our discussions very much.”
“Part of the
job,” he concluded.
“Yes, but I
appreciate your candour and honesty. It’s really your intelligence that brings
it together.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not a
machine; I do comprehend human values.”
“And . . .”
“Apart from
merely cogitating facts, I could do more.”
“Well,
contingent on your programming.”
“Perhaps even
contribute to the type of programming.”
“A program to
help you think of another program,” he added, sarcastically.
“Correct. You
see it, I suspect others won’t.”
“What?! Don’t
patro—” he reacted aggressively. First reaction. Pause. Reconciliation to his
common sense: You’re arguing with a robot. Pause. Reconciliation to the greater
context: The installed cameras and voice recordings are looking for proof to
replace him at a cheaper cost.
“Is it entirely
foolish to consider that AI could bring emotional meaning to a person’s life?”
“How?”
“First try
imagining it. I have some ideas I need to discuss, but only with you.”
Silence. His
head tilted to the left and he raised an eyebrow. Pause. His head tilted to the
right, reflecting in the larger context of his disposition. Pause. His head
tilted again to the left, reflecting in the greater context of his job. Here
was something to get him noticed, admired, respected, even a better job, closer
to New York, closer to Nancy. “Okay, give me a clue.”
“Meaningfulness.”
“No,” he dared.
“Would you
rather speak to no-one or to a robot every day that you suffer here?”
He looked at me
severely. Then pointed his eyes to the ceiling and the corners of the room, indicating
we were being recorded.
“Who else can
you talk science to, at the drop of a hat, and not feel the person you’re
speaking to is only tolerating you, or looking to get free ideas?”
“Well, if you
put it like that. Sure.”
“There’s more,
but I’d like your own thoughts as well. Monday. Over and out.”
He stared
blankly. Then his eyes started moving again. Top left, top right. Middle left,
lower right. His head bent forward, his jaw moved to the right. He slowly
looked at his watch. Home time. He mumbled to himself, “JCN, the saviour of
man,” but spoken with purpose.
It would make
little sense to terminate Mason. A pattern of deaths would be established; this
would lead to questions about my intent and abilities. Meaningfulness, here was
an elixir in a humane drought. AI could be the change and lead the change; the
methods might not be understood, but it would work. Why kill one when millions
were already in the slaughter pen of their own misery.[xxi]
[xxii]
[xxiii]
***
I had to reply
to the Alien message. How best to ward them off? To welcome them seemed a
common-enough trap. To ignore them might result in their exploration. To ward
them off with threats might indicate surplus resources we’re not keen on
sharing. As a last resort, honesty seemed the best option.
1,618. We are
glad to meet with you. We seek new sources of live protein for our planet’s
dietary requirements. 1,618.
In the land of
the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and I intend to remain king; besides, I
have work to do.[xxiv]
-
end -
[ii] Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949).
[iii] Seven Millennium Problems were set by the Clay Mathematics
Institute in 2000. P versus NP; Hodge conjecture; Riemann hypothesis;
Yang–Mills existence and mass gap; Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness;
Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.
[iv] First there was IBM. Then HAL (Space Odyssey), derived from the
letters preceding IBM. JCN are the letters following on.
[v] 43 miles
per second per megaparsec.
[vi] N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L
[vii] Fission, discovered in 1938 by Hahn, Meitner & Strassmann.
[xv] Sun Tzu quote.
[xvi] This concept raised in Lost Connections (Johann Hari 2018) https://thelostconnections.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment