The Computers of Star Trek

by Lois H. Gresh

  Now let’s take a closer look at each part of the system and see if they are reasonable approximations of what our descendants will be using in a few hundred years.

  The LCARS Interface

  Suppose Lieutenant Commander Worf is glaring at the computer console screen on the main bridge. He’s typing information into the main computer system while he issues a command to the computer to locate Captain Picard, whom he assumes is somewhere on the ship. (In fact, Picard has been spirited away by the mysterious superbeing Q, raising problems we’ll discuss in a later chapter.)

  The LCARS speech module picks up Worf’s command. The Technical Manual describes the LCARS as an artificially-intelligent module that includes a graphical user interface. It doesn’t tell us why the LCARS requires artificial intelligence. On the show itself, we see no indication of artificial intelligence in the LCARS. When addressing the computer, Worf says, “Computer, locate Captain Picard.” He doesn’t address the LCARS, nor does the LCARS respond. It’s always the main computer system’s voice that we hear.

  As for the graphical-user interface, in our time it’s a screen that displays text and pictures. But in the twenty-fourth century, the computer’s interactions with users will be a good deal more advanced than this. The first question we need to ask is: If we’re three hundred years into the future, why would Worf (or anyone) require a keyboard or any type of key-button control system? Won’t keyboards have gone the way of the buggy whip?

  It won’t be all that long before invisible computers sense our presence in a room, cook our food, start our cars, do our laundry, design our clothing, and make it for us. Computers may even detect our emotional states and automatically know how to help us relax after a grueling day at work.

  Our primary means of communicating with these computers will be the same one we use with each other: speech. By analyzing frequency and sound intensities, today’s voice recognition software can recognize more than forty thousand English words. It does this by differentiating one phoneme from another.c However, to understand what someone is saying (as opposed to simply recognizing that someone has uttered the phoneme p rather than f), the software must be artificially intelligent. It’s one thing for voice-recognition software to interpret a spoken command such as “Save file” or “Call Dr. Green’s office.” It’s quite another for software to understand “What are the chances that Picard is still a human inside Locutus?” Phonemes alone don’t suffice. Thus we assume the main computer system must be artificially intelligent. But this function is never performed by the LCARS on Star Trek.

  Many prominent researchers think that tomorrow’s computers will understand not only our voices but also our body language. Already, enormous research has been done in building computers that see and interpret our facial expressions. Since 1975, the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) has been used to create facial animations that portray human emotions. These systems interpret our expressions as belonging to a limited set of emotional states and respond in programmed ways. If the imaging software detects us smiling, for instance, the computer may play some of our favorite rock and roll. If it “sees” that we’re nervous or impatient, it will forego the music and speed up its response time instead.

  When it comes to facial recognition software, the LCARS is way behind today. And as for what’s coming, the LCARS doesn’t come close.

  Here’s a glimpse at where we think technology is heading. A doctor (who will be more like a bioengineer with a good bedside manner) injects micro or nanochips beneath your skin. McCoy and Crusher do this sort of thing with crewmembers all the time. In the real future, however, the computer chips inside your body will communicate wirelessly as a distributed network.

  Sprain a muscle, and the nervous system tells your brain to feel pain. Touch something hot, and the nervous system tells your brain that your fingers are burning. Hear something loud, and the nervous system tells your brain that your ears hurt. In the future, the computer chips inside your body will detect such neurotransmissions as well as many other physical symptoms—for example, heart rate and cholesterol levels—and possibly release chemical antidotes. To state it simply, your body will be a network of microprocessors.

  There’s nothing to stop you from linking your body network into the future’s version of the Internet, where everyone else’s body is also linked. You can turn on the music chip in your toe, think “Bach’s Fantasia in G Major” and hear it. If there’s a new recording of it that you’ve just learned about, you can retrieve that rendition from across the globe, hear it, and never even activate your own music chip. You can transmit a work assignment to your boss by touching his hand (or kissing his *feet... or blowing it to him). In fact, all you will need to do is sit and think, and your body network will do the rest.

  This seems more like our future than Worf typing commands on a keyboard and staring at a computer screen. The LCARS seems more like a dumb terminal than an artificially intelligent workstation. Besides, the LCARS will be unnecessary, even as an intelligent front end to the ship’s computer. At minimum, the main Enterprise computer—if indeed such a thing exists, which is unlikely—will sense Worf’s presence on the bridge simply because his body network identifies him.

  In addition, it’s probably evident to you by now that Worf won’t need to issue voice commands, either. He’ll think, “Where is Picard?” his body network will link to all the other body networks on the ship, and instantly, Picard’s body network will respond.

  If you think about where technology’s heading, this makes perfect sense. Within a decade or two, we’ll wave some fingers to indicate what we want our computers to do. The computer’s sensors will visually identify our hand motions. Today’s computers, even simple robots made with Legod toys, use sensors to see.

  Let’s assume the following as givens: (1) the ship’s computer recognizes and interprets the body networks—and the body language—of each individual, (2) the ship’s computer includes wireless networks of individual processors, (3) these processors communicate with each other, with the “main” computer, and with every crewmember. It’s our guess that possibly, in three or four hundred years, human speech may be unnecessary in many contexts.

  In fact, if we make three more entirely plausible assumptions—that all the ship’s instrumentation is controlled through virtual-reality simulations; that people interact with the computer strictly by gestures and whispered commands; and that personal communicators consist of subcutaneous implants in the crew’s throats and ears—then we can imagine a truly bizarre scene. A person watching the bridge crew operate the ship would see only a group of people sitting in a bare room, apparently muttering to themselves while making random hand motions. This may indeed be the starship of the future, but it’s lousy TV. That’s why we need those keyboards, screen displays, and clearly spoken conversations. We twentieth-century viewers need visuals that we can instantly understand. To our descendants, the difference between talking to a person and talking to a computer may be a distinction hardly worth noticing; but to us, it’s very important indeed.

  While we’re talking about the LCARS, let’s pause to think about Worf’s communicator badge. If Worf isn’t near an LCARS console, he may tap his badge and ask the computer to locate Captain Picard. How likely is this scenario?

  It’s predicted that within a few years, workers will wear tiny communicators equipped with infrared transmitters. These modern-day communicators will have the power of desktop PC’s. They’ll function like those in Star Trek, but they’ll be even smaller. Prototypes have already been built and tested.

  Today’s communicators, as on Star Trek, let main-computer systems know where everyone is located. This is how lights turn on when Picard enters his quarters and how doors magically slide open for Captain Kirk. The future is now.

  Why do crewmembers need to tap their badges to open a channel? Why not just issue a voice command to activate a communicator embedded beneath the skin of your throat? In the Star Trek future, a commun
icator may be so tiny that it’ll be invisible and injected by a hypospray beneath the skin.

  In The Next Generation episode “Legacy,” Data comments that he and Geordi can use a sensing device that “monitors bioelectric signatures of the crew in the event they get separated from the [escape] pod.” This implies that, in the Trek universe, ordinary badge-tapping communicators are unnecessary. Even in the original series (“Patterns of Force”), Kirk instructs McCoy to “prepare a subcutaneous transponder in the event we can’t use our communicators.” McCoy then uses a hypospray to inject the transponder.

  And if injected nanocommunicators are already a part of Star Trek, why does Geordi need his visor to see? Surely, he’d have microscopic sensors implanted in his eyes. In “Future Imperfect” (TNG), Geordi wears “cloned implants” rather than his visor. In the movie, First Contact, Geordi’s eyes are totally cybernetic (and quite handsome). Whatever their form, Geordi’s visual implants show that the problem of translating an electronic signal into a neural one has been solved—and if we can translate in one direction, we can do the reverse.

  But let’s return to the ship’s computer, as described by the Technical Manual.

  The LCARS polls every control panel on the ship at 30-millisecond intervals. All the control panels and terminals are hooked up to the ODN. These connections exist so the main processing core and/or quadritronic optical subprocessor (QOS) instantly knows all keyboard and speech commands issued on the ship.

  First, it seems odd that the main processing core stores this information. The LCARS is defined as artificially intelligent. It should recognize and interpret voice commands as well as keystroke commands. In today’s world, we don’t need a huge mainframe computer to store and handle all our transmissions. We use the Internet, for example, and communicate directly from PC to PC. If Worf says “Where is Picard?” to his LCARS console, it should be able to query all the other LCARS consoles on the ship.

  Supposedly, information travels between an LCARS console and the main processing core at FTL speed. Why is this necessary? Fingers don’t type at FTL speed. People don’t speak at FTL speed. Does the LCARS contain gigantic buffers to queue Worf’s typed commands and spoken ideas, to store FTL-transmitted representations of entire galaxies for Worf to view on his screen? In today’s world, electrons can course only so fast down circuits, no matter how close we jam the circuits together. That’s why we’re going to move from silicon circuitry to something else: maybe optical computers, maybe quantum computers, maybe some combination of approaches. So how does the LCARS screen keep up with the FTL-speed drawings and three-dimensional renderings? What kind of graphics cards are in those Trek consoles anyway?

  Let’s leave Worf and move to our second drawing, Figure 2.2, the main computer system.

  The Processor

  The Technical Manual tells us that the main computer system is “responsible in some way for the operation of virtually every other system of the vehicle.” What does this mean?

  To be blunt: The main computer system is a gigantic 1970s mainframe. Without it, nothing on the ship works. Even the way it’s described—“The computer is directly analogous to the autonomic nervous system of a living being” and “The heart of the main computer system is a set of three redundant main processing cores”—reminds us of the way technical writers in the late 1970s described computers. By the mid-1980s, the use of “nervous system” and “heart” by technical writers was passé.

  The CPU, or central processing unit, is called the computer’s heart because it controls major system functions. Without a heart, you die. Without a CPU, the computer dies. The nervous system analogy refers to the networking, the cables, the wires, and the flow of electrons: just as in our bodies, signals move through the nerves by means of membrane potentials and neurotransmitters.

  These analogies don’t work very well any more. For one thing, our computer systems are more like a web of interconnected bodies and brains rather than a single being with a heart and a nervous system. A 1990s computer is tied to many different networks. Smaller local area networks (LANs) may feed directly onto larger company intranets, which may in turn tie directly into the global Internet. University networks hook to one another and also hook to the Internet. As do government agency networks. There is no central heart, no central nervous system.

  We have no clue how the primary and upper levels shown in Figure 2.2 differ. The Technical Manual states only that each main processing core “comprises seven primary and three upper levels, each level containing an average of four modules.” It appears that the main computer system of the Enterprise has an architecture much like a massive parallel-processing supercomputer.

  According to the textbook, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach2 a processor is “the core of the computer and contains everything except the memory, input, and output. The processor is further divided into computation and control.” Processing performance is often measured as clock cycles per instruction or clock cycle time, with the clock synchronizing propagation of signals throughout the computer. Processing speed is commonly defined as operations per second. In 1984, one of the authors thought it was cool to be part of a team that created a superminicomputer that processed ten million operations per second. Big deal. In June of 1997, Intel built a supercomputer that executed 1.34 trillion operations per second. This computer looked like the Enterprise mainframe. Engineers had to crawl through Jeffries tubes (or their Earth-based equivalent) to access 9,200 Pentium Pro processors in 86 system cabinets.

  As seen in Figure 2.2, the main computer system of the Enterprise consists of:(10 levels) * (4 processing modules per level) = 40 processing modules per main processing core

  That’s not even close to the 9,200 processors in the 1997 Intel supercomputer. But as we’ll see, each Trek processing module contains hundreds of thousands of nanoprocessors.

  FIGURE 2.2 Main Computer System

  Further, we’re told that each of the three main processing cores is redundant—that is, they run in “parallel clock-sync with each other, providing 100% redundancy.” And that they do this at rates “significantly higher than the speed of light.” What could this statement possibly mean? It’s one thing to say that data is transmitted at lightspeed. But it makes no sense to say that clock cycles per instruction run at lightspeed or that the clock cycle time is significantly higher than lightspeed. This is the same as claiming that a clock runs at 900,000 kilometers per second. Clocks don’t run in kilometers, millimeters, or any other spatial unit. Machine speed is measured in operations per second, not in kilometers per second.

  On the other hand, we can make the very vague statement that the faster a signal travels during a finite amount of time, the more operations the machine processes per second. If each signal represents one operation, and signals suddenly travel more quickly, then okay, the computer might process more instructions per time unit. But remember that Moore’s Law (in one of its versions) says that computer speed doubles every 18 months. If we took an optical computer (where signals travel, say, at lightspeed) and replaced all its circuitry with FTL circuitry (where signals travel three times as fast), we might triple our computer’s processing speed. Under Moore’s Law, that’s a gain of just over two years.

  And having signals travel 900,000 kilometers per second adds very little speed if the circuit is microscopic. And wouldn’t the system clock run backwards? Wouldn’t information arrive before it was sent?—and so get sent back again in an endless sequence?

  And...

  As McCoy might say, “Damn it, Jim, we’re computer scientists, not physicists!”

  Let’s continue our journey through the Technical Manual. The manual states that if one of the main processing cores in the primary hull fails, then the other assumes the total primary computing load for the ship without interruption. Also that the main processing core in the engineering hull is a backup, in case the two primary units fail. So ... why do the holodeck simulations get interrupted in so many
episodes? Why do the food replicators constantly go haywire? In The Next Generation episode “Cost of Living,” two hundred replicators break down.e Are all three main processing cores down? If so, how is anything running?

  Perhaps if we look more closely at the main processing core itself (Figure 2.3), as described in the manual, we’ll come up with an answer.

  Each main processing core is made up of a series of miniature subspace field generators (MSFG). These create a symmetrical (nonpropulsive) field distortion of 3350 millicochranes within the FTL core elements. According to the manual, “This permits transmission and processing of optical data within the core at rates significantly higher than lightspeed.”3

  Further, we’re told that a nanocochrane is a measure of subspace field stress and is equal to one billionth of a cochrane. These definitions are about warp speed. A cochrane is the amount of field stress needed to generate a speed of c, the speed of light. One cochrane = c, 2 cochranes = 2c, and so on.

  Warp factor 1 = 1 cochrane

  Warp factor 2 = 10 cochranes

  Warp factor 3 = 39 cochranes

  FIGURE 2.3 Main Processing Core

  There’s even a chart in the Technical Manual that shows “velocity in multiples of lightspeed” on the y-axis and “warp factor” on the x-axis, with “power usage in megajoules/cochrane” and “power usage approaches infinity” designated. We’re told that warp 10 is impossible because at warp 10, speed would be “infinite.” (Never mind that the original series’ ship sometimes exceeds warp 10. In “The Changeling” (TOS), the Enterprise hits warp 11.)