The Hacker and the Ants Read Online Free PDF Page A

our evolutionary process often did little mutations to the good parameters that it copied. And there was a way of splicing parameter sets so as to “sexually breed” a successful pair of Veeps. Generation by generation, the process felt around in the vast search space of all possibilities.
    After a few quintillion machine instructions had flowed by, we’d gotten something like a good design. The evolution of artificial life!
    When GoMotion would get a combination of software and simmie that seemed to work well, they’d order up the parts and build a material prototype of the thing, like Studly.
    Rather than keeping a big physical inventory of mechanical and electronic parts, GoMotion used Blackstone Hardware. Blackstone was a cyberspace hardware store with ghostly replicas of all available hardware components on its aethereal and all but endless shelves. All available hardware —from pinhead diodes to prestressed concrete bridge beams, from jackhammers to
chip-etching lasers, from rubber washers to superconducting yttrium/iridium whiskers. It cost $1024 an hour to walk around in Blackstone’s, but it was totally worth it. Access time was fast, since you would have a knowledgeable and attentive clerk-simmie at your elbow—and once you found the part you wanted, you told the clerk and Blackstone would express mail it to you on the spot.
    The Blackstone clerk had whatever appearance you wanted: clean-cut college boy, overalled graybeard, bikini-clad calendar girl—there were about fifty choices. The clerk was a simmie being run by the Blackstone catalog software, though if you had a complicated question, a person at Blackstone would slip into the clerk simmie and talk through it as if it were his or her own tuxedo. You and your clerk could be visible or invisible to the other shoppers—as you liked. For reasons of industrial security, we at GoMotion always stayed invisible in Blackstone’s, as did most other big companies’ shoppers.
    The man who actually built our physical robot models was called Ken Thumb. Ken was a slim blue-collar type; soft-spoken, brilliant, implacable. Before signing on as GoMotion’s machinist he’d worked with the Survival Research Lab art/robotics group putting together big crazy machines out of parts he found in abandoned factories and warehouses. You’d just about never see Ken in virtual reality. As someone who built real machines out of real parts, he had an irritated contempt for cyberspace.
    It was a fact that cybercad designs didn’t always translate effectively from cyberspace to the machine shop. The cyberspace “physics” was, after all, only a limited model of Nature’s true laws. Actual materials tended to have small nicks, resonant vibrations, casting strains, thermal noises, transient voltages, and various other sources of unexpected chaoticity. This meant that
some virtual reality designs failed catastrophically when first incarnated by Ken. After he fixed the design, he would post scathing e-mail messages about what we had to do to bring our specs into line with reality.
    â€œWe” in this case was not so much me as it was Dick and Chuck, the thirty-year-old guys who did most of the nitty-gritty coding up of our Veep hardware designs. Dick was the Chief Engineer. He was pretty buttoned-down. Chuck was an insanely intense Florida country boy; every time I saw him he looked more gaunt. He was into hideously violent cyberspace battle games, Roman coliseum type matches, with full medical accuracy on the spurting arteries and severed bones.
    Another person I was seeing a lot at GoMotion was Jeff Pear, the tech group manager. He’d shown up and started acting like my boss only a few months earlier, which was something I still kind of resented. I hated having a boss, any boss; it was even worse than having a landlord. Pear had bailed to GoMotion from a company that had gone bankrupt using the Lisp programming