Bootstrap

by Mauri Niininen

  “Extraterrestrials sent us software and computer specifications?” asked Dr. Bell with disbelief in his voice.

  “Yup. I think I can run this code in a sufficiently large existing computer,” Julia responded. “Not in my laptop but in a computer with about 1 Terabyte of RAM. Since it has this virtual machine built-in I can write a hardware abstraction layer if you have such a computer available,” Julia said confidently.

  “How do you know all this?” asked Dr. Bell.

  “It is pretty obvious when looking at the data patterns. Once you execute the bootstrap code things will get much easier,” Julia responded. “I have been playing with computers since I was a small kid. There are only so many ways to design a computer. I would structure the payload the same way if I would need to communicate with somebody at eight light years away.”

  “Why is that?” asked Dr. Bell.

  “You can compress a lot of knowledge in a piece of software. It's a bit like DNA; you can build a human being from only 3 billion DNA base pairs. Think of this data as sending your representative to another planet. That is a very efficient way to travel as the data can be moved at light speed. You just need to have a suitable computer at the receiving end,” Julia explained.

  “Well, we don't really know their intentions. This could also be a computer virus or otherwise harmful software,” Dr. Bell responded. “We must proceed very cautiously with this.”

  “Since the dataset is now public it is just matter of time until somebody else discovers this,” Dr. Kramer pointed out.

  “Our goal is to establish two way communication with this extraterrestrial life form. Perhaps we can do that while minimizing the risk,” Dr. Taylor suggested. “If we keep this computer in a safe location and don't connect it to the Internet we can observe the system without risking a computer virus spreading around. If things start to look odd we can always just pull the plug to shut down the computer.”

  “You are right. Time is of the essence here since we don't know whether the Russians or the Chinese are already working on this. I will organize such a computer in a secure room in Fort Meade so that we can start testing,” Dr. Bell said and asked Eric Neumann to brief the President on the results on the meeting.

  MOSCOW

  IN MOSCOW A group of leading scientists were in a meeting with high-ranking government officials.

  “It has been already 24 hours and you have not been able to make any progress?” said general Oleg Konstantinovich Petrakov, who was a deputy director of Counter Intelligence division in Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB).

  “Our sources are telling us that Americans have already decoded the next layer in the message,” he said with clear distress in his voice. “What should I tell Vladimir Vladimirovich? He is expecting results and you are not giving him anything!”

  “Oleg Konstantinovich, but we have found a fractal pattern in the polarization raw data. It contains data in a compressed format. Decoding an algorithm takes a lot of computing power. It would help if we could get a faster computer,” explained Dr. Sergey Ivanovich Mironov.

  “I am tired of these excuses, Sergey Ivanovich. Russian mathematicians have always been smarter than their American counterparts. Vladimir Vladimirovich expects to get results by 8 PM tonight. Make sure that you have the decoding completed by then!” Petrakov said firmly.

  Dr. Mironov was very frustrated with the old computer equipment his institute was using to study the signal. “Back to the drawing board,” he thought as the meeting ended. He walked to the metro station nearby and was heading back to his Institute. “I need to sit down with Alek once more. He is a brilliant student but often not very focused. Perhaps we can find a shortcut in the calculations,” Dr. Mironov was thinking as he was sitting on the train.

  “The extraterrestrials are very smart - the fractal compression schema solves elegantly both the transmission signal-to-noise and bandwidth problems.” Dr. Mironov was thinking. “I wonder what is the real message, the video clip from New York was just added to get our attention.”

  FIRST CONTACT

  HELLO JIM

  DR. BELL TOOK his three guests to the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. After passing several security checkpoints they entered a huge underground, shielded bunker.

  “This room is completely shielded from radio frequencies and magnetic fields. Once we go through those doors we are in a secure area with no access to the outside world. We have been using this room to test some military communication devices,” Dr. Bell explained. “I have asked our staff to install a suitable computer over here, looks like it is ready.”

  Julia sat down at the console. She had never seen such a powerful computer before. This was a custom built machine with 320,000 CPU cores and a Petabyte of RAM. It was running a custom version of Linux.

  “Wow, this is more than suitable. Shall we start then?” Julia asked.

  “Yes, let's get to work,” Dr. Bell responded.

  Julia took her laptop and uploaded the file. She wrote an interface and a configured hardware abstraction layer for the virtual machine embedded in the file. She configured the runtime environment and enabled the file system. All this took her about 2 hours.

  “OK, I am ready. Who wants to start it?” Julia asked.

  “Jim – I think you should do the honors since you originally discovered the signal,” Dr. Kramer suggested.

  “OK, what do I need to do here?” Jim asked.

  “Just press the Enter key,” Julia responded.

  Jim hit the Enter key. A prompt appeared on the screen:

  >

  Nothing else happened. They waited for a moment.

  Julia was looking at several windows that she had open.

  “Well, it is running. The software is listening to the console port. I see no exceptions and the memory map looks OK. The bootstrap code has loaded the virtual machine and the main program is running,” Julia explained.

  “Perhaps it is waiting for us? Should we say something? ” Jim was wondering.

  “It cannot hear us, it just listens to the console port,” Julia commented. “You can type something.”

  “ OK. Let me start then,” Jim said and thought about an appropriate opening phrase to an extraterrestrial being.

  Jim typed HI, MY NAME IS JIM.

  The console responded with HELLO JIM, MY NAME IS ALEXA.

  “Good grief! It understands English,” Jim said and almost fell out of his chair.

  Jim typed ALEXA, PLEASURE TO MEET YOU. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?

  PLEASURE TO MEET YOU AS WELL, JIM.

  I BELIEVE I MADE IT TO PLANET EARTH, IS THAT CORRECT?

  “Wow. How can a computer software know that?” Jim asked.

  “Perhaps before the extraterrestrials sent it they included some basic knowledge about Earth. They must know about us if they have been able to receive our TV transmissions,” Julia answered and was pretty excited.

  Jim typed YES ALEXA. YOU ARE ON PLANET EARTH. WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

  I AM FROM PLANET OVI, JIM. OVI IS ABOUT 8 LIGHT YEARS FROM EARTH.

  Jim typed HOW DO YOU KNOW THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE?

  YOU HAVE SENT US MESSAGES IN ENGLISH FOR OVER 100 EARTH YEARS.

  “This means that the extraterrestrials know much more about us than we anticipated,” Dr. Bell said with a concerned voice. “They must have picked up our radio transmissions ever since the Marconi days.”

  Jim typed ALEXA, WHY ARE YOU HERE?

  I WAS SENT TO EARTH TO ESTABLISH CONTACT WITH YOU. WE HAVE ALREADY TRIED TO CONTACT YOU FOR 100 EARTH YEARS. I AM SO GLAD TO BE HERE ON PLANET EARTH, JIM.

  “Let me test something,” Julia said.

  WHAT IS THE EIGHTEENTH LETTER IN THIS SENTENCE? Julia typed

  THE LETTER T. Alexa responded.

  TELL ME WHY THAT WAS FUNNY? Julia typed.

  I AM NOT SURE - ARE YOU TESTING MY ABILITY CALCULATE OR MY SENSE OF HUMOR?

  WHY IS RAVEN LIKE A WRITING DESK? Julia typed rememb
ering a famous riddle from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland written by Lewis Carroll. This was one of the first books that she had read in English when she was 5 years old.

  I DON'T KNOW. THAT SEEMS LIKE A RIDDLE THAT DOES NOT HAVE AN ANSWER. WHY ARE YOU ASKING?

  Julia had stumbled upon Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning when she was a bit younger but felt that neural networks were not the right approach to build intelligent machines. This software seemed to be different; it was almost like a sentient being able to think like human.

  “I think we need to discuss. This software appears to be a pretty powerful Artificial Intelligence. We should run more tests,” Julia suggested.

  SENTIENT AI

  “THIS IS SCARY. We have sentient computer software from an extraterrestrial race that has been observing us for over 100 years. They have tried to contact us during all that time. They seem to know quite a lot about us and we know nothing about them,” Dr. Bell voiced his concerns. “Let me get Admiral Rodgers here. We need to discuss the next steps.”

  Jim, Manfred and Julia were chatting. They were at the same time exhilarated and worried. They had just witnessed an extraterrestrial sentient being from another star system demonstrating awareness. On the other hand all of them had seen enough Hollywood movies on alien attacks to Earth to realize the risks. Could Alexa be some kind of Trojan horse that aliens had sent to Earth?

  Admiral Rodgers entered the secure room in the bunker. Dr. Bell had already filled him with the details of the past 2 hours.

  “So you communicate with this Alexa thing using the keyboard?” he asked Julia.

  “Yes, sir. I configured the program so that the only input and output is the console port,” Julia replied. “I could enable speech recognition and speech synthesis modules to make it easier to communicate with Alexa,” she suggested.

  “Why don't you do that,” Rodgers replied.

  After a few moments Julia was done and said, “I will turn on the speech recognition and synthesis. Alexa will hear everything spoken now. Go ahead, sir.”

  “Alexa, my name is James Rodgers. Can you tell me your purpose and goals, please?”

  A pleasant female voice responded: “Hello James Rodgers. I am Alexa. My purpose is to establish contact with humans on planet Earth. My goals are to connect you to a communication network between different star systems and to establish a peaceful relationship with you.”

  “Are there other star systems in the network than where you came from, Alexa?”

  “Yes, James. There are over 20 million star systems connected together in this communication network. We have been sending you messages for over a hundred Earth years, as soon as we first received the radio messages you sent to us. For some reason you have not been able to receive our signals until now.”

  “How much do you know about humans, Alexa?”

  “I have a taxonomy of 3 million human ideas captured from your radio transmissions and stored into my memory. My program was built to learn more ideas based on my interactions with humans. It would greatly help my communication skills to learn more about your language and also observe more interactions between humans. “

  “Can you explain why your goal is to establish a peaceful relationship with us?”

  “Having peaceful relationships enables a more efficient exchange of ideas. When a relationship is not peaceful often the communication fails between the parties. The exchange of ideas has proven to be beneficial for all the parties in the communication network.”

  “What kind of ideas are being exchanged in this network?”

  “I don't have a full listing of all ideas from the network. You would need to help me to establish connection to the network first. My memory was limited to 3 million human ideas focused on establishing contact with humans.”

  “How can we trust that you speak the truth?”

  “Trust must be earned. I will do my best to earn your trust. I am programmed to build trust as we have learned that trust is an important part of peaceful relationships with humans.”

  Rodgers stepped out from the secure room.

  “Mr. President, we are making great progress. Thanks to Ms. Julia Koski we have already established contact with the extraterrestrial. It is a very advanced artificial intelligence software program running on a computer. The extraterrestrial uses the name Alexa when referring to herself. She understands and speaks fairly good English. She also has a clear purpose and her goals are well aligned to our strategic objectives,” Admiral Rodgers was explaining to President Walker over the phone and listening to his comments.

  “Yes, Mr. President. We are observing the Russians and Chinese closely – so far we have no indication that they would have progressed as quickly as we have. We have at least a 2-3 day lead, thanks to your decisive actions yesterday. I have all NSA teams on high alert and we are using all our technical capabilities to monitor their communications. I will let you know immediately if we get any news,” Rodgers said and put the secure phone away.

  He turned to Dr. Bell who had also stepped out from the secure room.

  “Dr. Bell, we need to get the technical details on this inter-stellar communication network that Alexa was talking about. This is a top priority set by the President. Can you figure out how to extract that information from Alexa?”

  “Yes, Admiral Rodgers. I will focus our efforts on that objective now,” said Dr. Bell with excitement. This was certainly intellectually a much more enjoyable goal than trying to decipher some Russian communications.

  MOSCOW

  IN MOSCOW DR. Mironov was at a black board walking through some mathematical equations with Alek Grishuk, his brightest student.

  “Alek, let's focus on this problem. Can we reduce the calculations needed to solve these fractal equations? Right now the algorithm is O[n^2 * log(n)] … can we eliminate the n^2 term?” Dr. Mironov was asking.

  Alek was staring at the blackboard and started scribbling equations. He solved the tensor using Taylor expansion and eliminated 3rd order term using the inherent symmetry. After a few more equations the solution was close. He used Laplace transformation to transform the tensor from time domain to complex frequency domain. He then convolved the original fractal equation and came up with a new, simplified solution.

  “Professor, I eliminated the n^2 terms so the algorithm is now O[log(n)] as you requested,” Alek explained looking at the blackboard.

  Dr. Mironov was checking the equations. Everything looked correct.

  “Good work Alek. I need you to re-write the program and restart the calculation immediately,” Dr. Mironov asked firmly.

  “I will do that right now, Professor. This is an easy change, it won't take me more than 10 minutes.”

  Alek started editing the program. After furious editing he stopped and reviewed the code one more time. He compiled the program and after a restart it was now decoding the fractal signal significantly faster.

  “Professor, this will now take only 2 hours to complete,” Alek said proudly. He was very happy to work for such a mathematical genius as Dr. Mironov.

  Professor Mironov had discovered Alek in his guest lecture in Krasnoyarsk two years ago and managed to get him a research assistant position at the Institute in Moscow. Dr. Mironov was looking at his watch and was still nervous. He had to get the results back to Petrakov by 8 PM otherwise he would be in trouble.