Monday, 09 March 2009

• Inheriting Skynet

  I walked into the little house, holding in my chest what might be my last gasp of clean air for a while.  The squalid rent-house was littered with food packages, half-opened boxes, and furniture shoved into strange locations.  The thing that compounded the mess, however, was the layers of ashes and tar on... well, everything. 

  No, there was no fire in this building, unless you count the successions of little fires at the tips of the countless cigarettes the former inhabitant of the house smoked over the years.  Everything I brushed by deposited cigarette ashes on my clothes.  The windows of the little house were stained brown from the tar of cigarette smoke.  The stale odor of cigarette smoke seeped through the dust mask I wore over my face.  I was so glad I didn't smoke, because this would make me want to quit.

  I was so shocked by what I saw, it took me a few minutes to figure out what I needed to do.  I'm normally not a neat freak, but almost every thought firing off in my brain told me to leave.  I had been warned by my friends about the condition of this place, but to see it in person was unfathomable.  It took about 10 minutes of standing in this mess to collect my nerves and

  I ventured to the back of the apartment, to find what I thought I was looking for.  A bank of older computers lined the back walls.  Old Apple IIe's and PowerMacs that were popular when I was in school.  I found one newer PC, with roughly the same stats as my computer at home.  Okay, it was a little better, but not by much since it was an e-Machine.  All the computers were stained brown and many were covered with ash from the former occupant's smoking habit.  The smoke and stains were so bad, you couldn't make out the letters on some of the keyboards.  Maybe a third of the letters on the PC keyboard were clean of the stains, from the repetitive commands the user typed there.  The mouse was covered with tar, except for a handprint where the user repeatedly clicked with the left mouse.  

  By the look of the place, you would expect this to be the home of some sort of recluse; a hermit who seldom expected company.  But you probably wouldn't expect this to be the home of one of the most powerful chess programs in the world.  Donald had been working on Chesster for over 20 years, developing an artificial intelligence that could actually remember and learn.  In the last couple of years, he had made great strides in the programming, and felt like it was working the way he wanted it to.  The problem was, this was on a dinky old Mac computer.  He spent the last year or so porting the software over to PC.  The last time I walked with him, on New Years Eve, he told me that Chesster on PC was ranked third or fourth amongst other computer chess programs, and the true AI feature hadn't even been translated from the Mac to the PC.

  Unfortunately, Donald's work was cut short.  Two weeks ago, he was found unconscious by paramedics after a heart attack.  He went into a coma, and didn't come out.  He passed away a week later.

  I asked the family what they were going to do about Chesster a few days later.  They told me I could take whatever I wanted from Donald's computers.  They warned me that most of what he had were old-school Macs, and what condition many of them were in.  But I just couldn't see 20+ years of coding go to the landfill just because his family didn't know what to do with it.  With the family's permission, I went over there and recovered what I could of his equipment.  I may go back again, once I figure out where I'm going to store all that smoke-soaked equipment.  The project is a bit overwhelming, but I'm used to taking on overwhelming tasks. 

  I'm wondering now what's in the harddrives and disks I picked up.  Is it all junk from years of crappy conditions and data rot?  Or is it something more?  Do I have in my posession a great chess program, or is it perhaps the beginnings of Skynet?

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