Exclusive!

For years we've been presenting to you, our faithful readers, articles, essays, and stories that have been helpful in enriching your lives in the 26th century. And you have rewarded our efforts by continuously supporting our magazine.

In this groundbreaking issue of our magazine, we present Exclusive to our readers, an interview with the enigmatic and controversial figure of Dr. Benjamin Bjord, who succeeded in creating true Artificial Intelligence a few years ago, eventually to destroy his own work and go into hiding where he has remained untraceable.

As I am relieved of my blindfold, the intense glow of parachromatic light pierces my eyes as they accustom to its unfaltering, brilliant lighting. I am seated on a wooden chair, bound by tight ropes everywhere except my arms, which are free to record this conversation on my PDA. The room feels like a laboratory of some sorts with floating computer terminals, half-completed machines and circuits all around.

I hear footsteps, and the tall figure of Dr. Bjord enters the room. He seats himself on a chair opposite to me as I stare at his unkempt face. He greets me with a smile.

Me: Hello, Dr. Bjord. It's nice to see you.

BB: I'm glad to see a new face too. But my time here is precious. Can we skip the pleasantries?

Me: There are a lot of burning questions on my mind, but I'll begin with The Question: How did you succeed in creating A.I.?

BB: Yes, I saw this coming. Honestly, I have no intentions of sharing my secrets, but there's always been this part of me that wants to tell the world about my experiences.

It all began with my quest for shortening code lengths. I had been working on a few tedious projects, and the continuous coding would eat up my brain. The code sections were repetitive - with only a few changes. I noticed these patterns, and created codes that wrote codes to perform simple tasks, displaying a message, for example. In short, I was teaching the computer to code itself.

Things like that had been done before, and the codes required a human control. I wasn't worried about AI, I just wanted as much of ease on my part as possible. So I created code writing codes for a variety of common tasks.

Within a few years I knew I had built enough of a Database to encompass almost all programming knowledge and practices. However, all of them required human comprehension and control to be used. Soon I began thinking of a way to let these codes be used by the computer itself.

Me: How did you do that?

BB: My goal was to create a world within the system: a world that could produce Intelligence. I began with creating challenges: codes that were meant to delete randomly, murderers, if you will. They were strong codes, capable of overriding simple security measures. However, they were not allowed to destroy the Database I had created. It was present freely in the world. Any other code wanting to access them could do it without an effort.

And then, I created the most important components of my world: the "living" codes. All of them were empty to begin with. They had absolutely no abilities except that they could access the Database and execute its codes. But there were three important attributes I provided them with : "Life", "Replicate", and "Enemy".

The Life attribute reflected the presence of that code in the storage. If a code was being deleted, its Life attribute would turn to false. Each code was designed to maximise the amount of storage it occupied, so this was like an alarm.

The Replicate attribute is a bit complex. All I will say about it is that a code could copy itself to another area in the memory only if the Replicate attribute would turn true. However, there were strict conditions before that could happen.

And then, most significantly, I gave them the Enemy attribute. This attribute could take on three values: "The World", "Other Codes", and "None". Initially these values were distributed randomly amongst the codes, but I also gave them the ability to change this attribute.

After all this, I just ran the primary code, which executed the "living" codes simultaneously, assigning them their values, and running the killing codes. Within a few minutes, the system was stalled.

Me: What happened?

BB: I can only guess. The processes were executed in an infinite loop. There was no ending to it. Moreover, they were designed to control. Naturally, they resisted external control, which came from me. The terminal had to be destroyed.

I had fortunately recorded my work somewhere else and began it afresh, this time, slowing the process immensely and allowing a global viewer program that was hardcoded and could not be modified. It gave me access to view each of the codes, their attributes, and how they interacted with each other...

Me: So, what did you see?

BB: The world initially was in extreme chaos. The deleting codes were powerful and prominent, and reigned supreme. But soon, things began to change: the way I wanted them to. The living codes began to evolve.

I mentioned the "Enemy" attribute earlier, it played a vital role in this evolution. Very few codes used their ability to change this attribute. They would fix their attributes very soon:

The codes with "The World" as their enemy were the ones who evolved the first. They were truly the strongest codes in the system, the ones who represented "Intelligence", responsible for anything new to come out of the world. They constantly battled against the database, trying to make sense and trying to create codes to help them against the deletors.

The codes with "Other Codes" as enemies would follow suit soon. They could not accept the fact that some codes were stronger than them, and hence would copy their defenses and modified them in order to help their own purposes. They would never come up with something new. They used these modified codes to fight against the other codes, often with the sole purpose of deleting them. Though their strongest enemy were the "The World" codes, they knew they couldn't harm them. In this way, they constantly fought amongst themselves, trying to prove their superiority...

(We hear a distant ringing in the background, BB gets up from his seat)

BB: Aah, it's time for me to go and you to be sent back where you came from.

Me: But what happened to the codes without an enemy?

BB: (speaking as he leaves the room) Well, most of the codes with "Other Codes" as their enemy liked to pretend that they belonged to this category. They found ways to show that they held this attribute.

But the ones truly without an enemy, well, they soon found ways of deleting themselves.