by Adrian Berry
The seventeenth-century French mathematician, , was approached by an irritated gambler anxious to know why he always lost when betting on the appearance of certain combinations in the fall of dice. Pascal, after consulting (of ‘last theorem’ fame), responded by inventing the ‘Pascal triangle’, an inverted pyramid of numbers in which each was the sum of the two above it.
This enabled the gambler to understand the odds on dice throws and win some money, and it also created modern probability theory on which most statistical science is based. While no outcome is absolutely certain, it can be seen, with the aid of the triangle, that, for example, if a coin is tossed a sufficiently large number of times, the odds on getting roughly an equal number of heads and tails rises towards infinity.
The subject of triangles brings up one of the most extraordinary pieces of ‘useless’ research yet to appear. This is a design for wallpaper by , a mathematician at the University of Texas at which poses challenges that are both mathematical and psychological.
‘It appears to be infinitely complicated and unpredictable, until you are told how it works,’ said his colleague , of the University of Warwick at Coventry, author of an article in the New Scientist-, which reproduces the diagram. ‘Then, suddenly, you see it as being simple.’
Most wallpaper patterns, however complicated, involve repetition, but Radin’s seems truly random and chaotic. On a big enough scale, it would be the ultimately difficult jigsaw puzzle - and yet its creation was simple.
It starts, at the centre, with a single right-angled triangle. Four more identical triangles surround it. Each of these four is surrounded by four more such triangles, and so on. The result is that the triangles point in all directions with an infinite number of orientations.
But what can it do} ‘I don’t know for sure,’ Radin said, ‘but I have a strong suspicion that it resembles the crystalline structure of some material. A physical chemist might at once see some meaning to it that I cannot.’
If Radin is right, he will be, like , the second great scientist to have had a crazy-seeming dream that turned into something useful.
The Day the Computer Murdered the Magnate
The heroine enters a forbidden room in the creepy old house. There, in a mouldering chest, she finds . . . What?
Many novelists at this point have to pour themselves another drink and think hard. But two remarkable computer software packages are now available that will do this ‘thinking’ for them. Plots Unlimited and Collaborator are computer programs that help to work out the plots of novels, TV dramas and films.
Far from being gimmicks, they have both enabled several fiction writers to do their plotting in a fraction of the time it would normally have taken. With versions that will run on most personal computers, they are being greeted as tremendous advances in the science of machine ‘intelligence’, the art of teaching computers to reason like humans.
But they are not popular with everyone. Some members of the Writers Guild, the trade union that represents Hollywood writers and which has called six strikes in the last three decades, have demanded their prohibition lest they put writers out of work. ‘Why should a producer hire me when he can buy these floppy disks instead?’ one of them asked.
The creators of the programs - themselves members of the Guild - dismiss such fears as absurd. ‘Our program will not write your story for you,’ said , one of the two creators of Plots Unlimited and who, in pre-computer days, wrote for The Man From UNCLE and The . ‘It provides no descriptions or dialogue or atmosphere. What it does is to overcome writer’s block and release the creative juices.’
This is the latest of many steps in the computerization of creative writing. First came the word processor with its attached printing machine which eliminated the need to hire a typist - who usually required three weeks to turn an untidy mess of correction-choked pages into a neat typescript.
Then came on-screen spelling checkers, followed by grammar and style checkers, which would flash warnings if sentences became too long and made the style turgid. Now come aids which are genuinely creative. Plots Unlimited, which costs £240 and has sold hundreds of copies in Britain, consists of a vast database of more than 5,000 skeletal plots and characters that can be manipulated and juxtaposed to produce an almost infinite number of different stories.
While it concentrates on plots, its American rival, Collaborator is more concerned with characters. Both have sold about 6,000 copies worldwide. The creators of Plots, Weingarten and Tom Sawyer, writer with the Murder She Wrote TV series, decided to build a computerized version of an ancient and rather cumbersome Hollywood writers’ guide book called Plotto that contained fragments of stories that an author could meld together into a single tale.
Weingarten was executive producer of a Maigret thriller shown on British television starring (not to be confused with the series starring ). Based on ’s characters, he used the Plots program to create his own story, Maigret Meets a Milord, that critics thought highly original.
As the first step, he was asked by the program to choose a ‘plot shell’. He selected one that read: ‘Law officer A investigates a family, consisting of characters A-2, A-3 and B, who have internal problems.’ Giving these people names, he built this up into a story of Maigret investigating a reclusive and tyrannical family patriarch who controls a giant shipping-company. The man’s whereabouts are unknown and he will only communicate with his subordinates by fax and telex. His two sons are determined to wrest control of the company from him. They attempt negotiation, but all the emissaries they send to him are mysteriously murdered.
‘At this point I was stumped,’ said Weingarten. ‘It seemed a promising beginning, but I could not figure out why all these people were being murdered.’ He asked the program to give him a ‘leadout’, a plot development that would bring the story to a climax. Leadouts are the heart of the program, since they are intended to follow logically those parts of the plot already decided upon. It suggested several sub-plots in which the chief character - in this case the patriarch - was an imposter.
‘This gave me the idea that the man might have been dead for many years and was being impersonated by his former chief of staff who naturally had to kill anyone who discovered his true identity.’
In addition to the characters, the user of Plots has the option also to name the Thing, the inanimate object which some or all of the characters are trying to obtain for noble or nefarious purposes. As Sawyer put it: ‘The ring in The Lord of the Rings, the stolen cigarette lighter in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Othello’s missing handkerchief, the unidentified harbour in The Thirty-Nine Steps, the pirate’s map in Treasure Island, the secret plans in innumerable spy stories, all these are just devices to create or heighten conflict.’
But might not the program eventually start regurgitating the same plots? ‘It will, but no one but a scholar of fiction will ever notice,’ said Sawyer. ‘There is no such thing as an original plot. As put it, drama is real life with the dull parts left out. Even science-fiction stories, which often claim to be original since they revolve around a little-known scientific principle, have conflict at their core, and without conflict there is no plot. Since the time of , almost every plot written has been just another variation of an existing one.
‘For example, the film Pretty Woman is just a variation of My Fair Lady, which in turn is borrowed from Pygmalion and Cinderella. The sub-plot of the classic war film Casablanca, in which the anti-Nazi resistance hero suspects of seducing his wife, is a variation of Othello. And the film Apocalypse Now, the story of a man who clashes with another culture, is just an updated version of ’s Heart of Darkness.’
The Collaborator program works in an entirely different way. It is concerned with characters rather than plots. It does not try to construct a story. It asks its users hundreds of questions about the imaginary people they are trying to create, almost like a psychiatrist who gets to know his patients by endlessly questioning them.
‘Its purpose is
to make you think about these people, so that you will know how they will react in all conceivable circumstances,’ said , who gave up his career as a Hollywood press agent to help create it. ‘Without that knowledge of your characters you will never have a story,’ said his colleague , who used the program to write the film Benya The King, the story of a Jewish gang-leader who becomes a Soviet general and which stars .
‘By the sheer process of questioning,’ said Garfinkle, ‘it helps you to build up a hero and a villain, without whom there is no conflict. It will ask you about their loyalties, past histories, abilities, ambitions and so forth. By answering the questions you will come to understand how these people react to each other, and the story - if you have the talent to write it - will begin to take shape in your head.’
‘Contrary to appearances,’ said Feighan, ‘the Collaborator has no more brains than my pencil.’ But as the British electronics genius predicted back in 1950, the vast speeds and unfailing memories of computers would eventually enable them to mimic the human mind.
Spare Parts for All
When we buy new cars, cameras, computers and telephones, there is a growing chance that we are not really buying them at all, but machines made of pieces of old cars, cameras, computers and telephones.
Welcome to the new global economy of ‘design for disassembly’, or DFD, which has the advantage of protecting the planet’s environment by reducing garbage disposal while being primarily driven by the need to increase company profits. It presages the day when almost everything can be recycled, including parts of our bodies, so that sufferers from disease would merely instal an artificial organ that had been used by someone else.
The present practice of DFD, described in Fortune magazine, is of consumer goods being built, not to be thrown away at the end of their lives, but to be stripped down so the parts can be reused. Back in 1987, for example, personal computers made by Siemens Nixdorf were made of 87 major components. In a factory, it took 33 minutes to put them together and 18 minutes to take them apart. The company’s new PC is a much simpler device. It contains only 29 components, can be assembled in seven minutes and taken apart in four.
Some 70 million ‘old’ computers - most of them no more than a year old - are now in the basements of various organizations. Until recently, their unwanted parts would have been dumped in the countryside, at the risk of causing toxic pollution. But now their chips are being recycled i l new computers.
‘For many applications, old chips can be used over and over,’ said Dundee Navin-Chandra, of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. ‘For much of the routine work done in banks, chips don’t have to be any faster or more powerful than their predecessors.’
Some BMW cars are, in weight, 85 per cent recycled parts, and the company is aiming at 90 per cent. At the Northern Telecom telephone factory in Toronto, most of the shop-floor work consists of ripping out the innards of old telephones and putting them into new plastic housings for resale. ‘We’re on the threshold of changing our entire product strategy,’ said , the company’s senior vice-president for environment and ethics.
DFD means a world with a minimum of screws because screwed-together components take too long to separate. Instead, they are ‘snap-fitted’ so that they can be instantly unfitted. At an experimental plant at Highland Park, Michigan, technicians at America’s three main car manufacturers, Ford, Chrysler and General Motors, practise taking apart brand-new cars and storing the parts on shelves.
The European Parliament has passed a law requiring manufacturers to recycle their packaging materials. In Germany, where a similar law is in force, the amount of industrial packaging that would otherwise have been dropped into garbage dumps has been reduced by 600 million tons, 4 per cent of the total.
In the same country’s Hewlett-Packard computer factory, waste packaging has now moved into the computers themselves. Hardened plastic foam is beginning to replace the metal frames that formerly held the machines together.
In a sense, there is nothing new in DFD. It is only commercial hardware that is being recycled. Recycling itself is a natural process of life, culture and physics.
Literature, in the form of novels, plays and operas, is made up almost entirely of old plots. In popular music, there are few new tunes. Computer software, ever since it was invented, has been largely built up from libraries of old sub-routines. In Basic, for example, there is scarcely a program that does not contain the screen-steadying lines like:
500 A$=INKEY$: IF A$= THEN 500
Our bodies - for that matter the entire Earth - are made from atoms that were forged in the nuclear furnaces of giant stars. They, in their turn, will one day be the atoms of the bodies of people not yet born.
Indeed, DFD may be the first step in a much deeper revolution. If technicians can stack up all the components of brand-new cars in all their complexity, ready to be swapped around and assembled into new vehicles, the time may not be far off when we set up inventories of human body-parts. Perhaps the same artificial hearts and livers can be recycled through many generations of human owners.
Medicine from Space. . .
The next few years should see the biggest advance in medical research since ’s discovery of disease-causing microbes in the last century: the launch of international space station Alpha.
Alpha, a 400-ton permanently manned structure the size of a football field, will be one of the most important laboratories ever built. The European Space Agency (with Britain, to its shame, opting out), Canada and Russia are all contributing to this joint venture with the United States. It will cost £19 billion over 15 years, an annual cost of one eighth of what Americans spend each year on pizza.
For the first time it will be possible to study in detail the nature of the 150,000 or so proteins in the cells of our bodies which carry out all biochemical processes. Apart from 1,200, we are ignorant of their fundamental structures.
The proteins range from the simplest, which contain amino acids, the building blocks of life, to the complex ones such as the haemoglobin molecule that carries oxygen through the bloodstream, the collagen responsible for the structure of bones, tendons, ligaments and skin, and the antibodies protecting us from bacteria and viruses.
To be studied, proteins must be isolated in solutions where they solidify into crystals. Once a crystal is large and well formed, multiple X-ray pictures can be taken of it, and three-dimensional computer models created from the X-ray images. But doing this is next to impossible on Earth because of the gravity, in which all but a few protein crystals are formed small, clumped together or distorted in shape. Everywhere on the planet, a pressure of one gram will inhibit their growth.
‘Seventy per cent of proteins crystallize better and more quickly in weightlessness than on Earth,’ Larry DeLucas, the project’s chief scientist, told the 1995 meeting in Atlanta of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘But even in space-shuttle flights, this crystal growth cannot be done properly because it takes more than sixteen days for proteins to grow into very large crystals, and shuttle flights seldom last that long.’
Since almost every disease springs from the misbehaviour of proteins, or the invasion of them by foreign proteins through viruses or bacteria, the ability to study them in large crystallized form for long periods, enabling scientists to see their atomic structure, is clearly essential for designing drugs that can treat them.*
*The space station, I therefore predict, will survive because it appeals to one of the strongest human desires, to increase one’s longevity. Only in this century has this desire enjoyed full rein. For the space station could not have flown in the days when the Church was stronger than it is now, even if it had been technically possible to build it - its purposes would have been considered heretical. Walter Scott, in his introduction to his 1831 historical novel Quentin Durwood, relates with expressions of horror how, when the wicked French king Louis XI lay on his death bed, he ‘wearied Heaven and every saint with prayers, not for the forgive
ness of his sins, but for the prolongation of his life’.
But in an age when people will unashamedly do anything to live a few years longer, and when nobody thinks this is selfish or sinful, the specactle of an orbiting laboratory whose main purpose is enabling them to do so should have an all-powerful appeal.
And because every drug would be customized for a disease-causing protein, there is a good chance that it could be used on a patient, without any side effects.
In short, it is hoped that scientists in space station Alpha will be able to make drugs that attach themselves to specific proteins, altering their behaviour at molecular level, and cure Aids, cancers, diabetes, heart illness, emphysema, arthritis and countless other diseases. It is expected that more than 600 experiments in medicine and the life sciences will be made during Alpha’s 15-year life.
One dangerous ailment that will be studied in Alpha is loss of balance, a failure of the inner ear that injures and kills so many old people.
‘In an environment where gravity is a millionth of that on Earth, we hope experiments with astronauts will enable us to find out much more about how the inner ear communicates with the brain,’ says DeLucas.
‘Another disease that strikes old people is osteoporosis, brittleness of bones through loss of calcium. But astronauts in weightlessness lose bone calcium ten to twelve times faster than osteoporosis-sufferers on Earth.
‘If we can design a drug that will slow down their calcium loss, that drug should be able to do the same with osteoporosis sufferers.’
During a visit to the NASA/Boeing plant at Huntsville, Alabama, I discovered that 20 tons of the complex Alpha station have now been built. When the full 400 tons are ready, 34 space shuttle flights will be needed to assemble it all into the world’s most sophisticated medical laboratory.
. . . And Telescopes in Hospital