Lewis closeted himself in Doyne’s bedroom with the roulette wheel and Raymond, where he gathered data for a couple of hours a day before hitting the beach in the afternoon to work on his tan. His task was to find out the computer’s exact advantage over wheels tilted at different angles and spun at different speeds. A young instructor at the university with degrees from Cal Tech and Berkeley, Lewis tooled around town in a Triumph Spitfire and sported a polyester wardrobe that made him look more corporate than academic, which was appropriate considering that he later left the university to play the stock market. Laid back and laconic, he was amused by the Project and put in a lot of work on it, both theoretical and practical.
Charlene Peterson, a friend of Doyne and Letty’s from Stanford, was also newly enlisted into the Project. Charlene had saved enough money working as a cocktail waitress at Ricky’s Hyatt House to buy land in northern California, and now she and her boyfriend were accumulating their last stash of capital before dropping out for good. She was teaching primary school in the Santa Cruz Mountains when Doyne tapped her as a potential Eudaemon. He imagined that Charlene—“the beautiful Girl Scout type,” with the patter of a cocktail waitress initiated into Zen Buddhism—could replace Alix in the role of high-stakes bettor.
John Loomis was another Stanford friend recently recruited. Along with talents as an art historian, Italian cook, and singer of Tuscan folk songs, Loomis was good with his hands. He was working as a carpenter in the Bay Area when Eudaemonic Enterprises brought him to Santa Cruz to perfect the input-output devices. After taking the condoms off the solenoids and discovering that rip-stop nylon worked even better to hold them in place, he then built a new apparatus for fitting the buzzers securely against the stomach.
Nerds—the term for goggle-eyed technicians whose dreams oscillate between wiring diagrams and Playboy pinups—were not employed by Eudaemonic Enterprises. But they did have a hacker. This is a more specific word describing someone possessed by the beauty of computers and their programs, a person so in tune with the new technology that it responds in his hands with wild inventiveness. Jim Crutchfield was proud to consider himself one of this species. Endemic to the Silicon Valley and other high-tech regions, hackers communicate by means of a language as distinct as Serbo-Croatian or Basque. It defines a close-knit community and distinguishes those who really know computers from those who merely use them. With nary a reference to the English language, a hacker in full throat can shape entire paragraphs around the syntax of baud rates, warm boots, down-loaded programs, bits, buffers, babble, and other binarisms.
A San Franciscan who wears his brown hair parted in the middle and long over his ears, Crutchfield surfs, snorkels, and backpacks. But what he really cares about in life are computers. The intense and abstracted look on his face, the compression along the forehead, the mumbling to himself, the diffidence, and an inability to chitchat in the small coin of everyday speech are signs of a hacker more interested in talking to machines than to humans. “The real distinction among computer users isn’t between theoreticians and experimentalists,” he said. “It’s between hackers and nonhackers. The hackers are the ones who understand systems and how to use them.”
As an exemplary tale of hacking—and warning about a way of life in danger of selling its soul to the highest bidder—Crutchfield told me about his days in the Home Brew Computer Club. Long before talk about “computer literacy,” a group of nerds, hackers, freaks, and college students in Silicon Valley used to get together and compare notes. “One night,” said Crutchfield, “two longhaired hackers showed up with a PC board connected to a screen capable of doing primitive graphics. Dope-smoking hippies like the rest of us, they had wired the thing together in their garage—except that this was Stephen Wozniak and Steven Jobs, and they happened to be carrying the first Apple computer.
“All of us knew we were looking at something important, but I’m amazed at how fast the knowledge has spread out into the general population. As Xerox and IBM move in to package everything, I wonder if there’s still going to be room for the hackers. That’s where this country is still way ahead of the Japanese. They have such a highly structured society that they don’t have any place in it for misfit hackers. But these are the people coming up with the truly creative ideas. This is where you get the real advances.”
Besides lending his expertise to Eudaemonic Enterprises, Crutchfield was also hacker-in-residence to a special research group at the university that included Norman Packard and Doyne Farmer. Doyne had been lured back to graduate school to work on the physics of chaos. New theories were in the air for describing chaos, or at least some of its simpler manifestations, by means of geometrical structures known as strange attractors. Some of the earliest research into these structures—news of which would soon shake up the entire profession—was being done at Santa Cruz. When not examining chaos in their laboratory at the university, the Projectors were playing roulette down on Riverside Street, and for several years these two inquiries were pursued with equal passion.
The study of strange attractors has recently become the hot topic in nonlinear dynamics, which encompasses behavior that used to be dismissed as turbulent or random or otherwise too complicated to be explained. To simplify their lives, physicists from Galileo to the present have theorized about stable, linear systems. These are exceedingly rare, however, and what real life mostly offers are nonlinear, unstable, dynamic, and chaotic systems—things like cloud patterns and flowing water and the firing of synapses in the human brain. Contemporary physics is currently in the midst of a revolution as it turns from the study of linear to nonlinear systems. But it was only a few years ago that the entire field, with no more than a handful of researchers, was wide open to scientists accomplishing the breakthrough work in isolating strange attractors and defining some of the simpler forms of chaos.
Calling themselves either the Dynamical Systems Collective or the Chaos Cabal, Crutchfield, Packard, Farmer, and their fourth member, the young physicist Robert Shaw, would make a name for themselves doing a good bit of this seminal research. But when they first got started, they had nothing going for them other than a combination of talent and luck. And computers. The new physics is too complex to be done without them, and the Chaos Cabal—all of them by then hackers in their own right—happened to be more knowledgeable about computers than any other physicists around. Their hours spent in the Project Room programming, soldering, and debugging roulette computers would pay off in unexpected ways. They had reached the point where they could patch together a system and write a program to study the physics of anything, from roulette balls to strange attractors.
The KIM and the roulette computers were fine for solving Newtonian and quantum equations. But chaos is a tougher nut. Cracking it requires a computer big enough for what hackers call number crunching. Poking around in the basement of the physics building one day, the Chaos Cabal found an old Systron Donner analog computer left over from an engineering department that never got built at Santa Cruz. Old and dusty, the machine was also monstrous in capacity; so they dragged it into an empty office and got it up and running. Adding a collection of Z-80 based micros and a NOVA digital computer cadged from the experimental high-energy physics group, the Dynamical Systems Collective wired itself into a rat’s nest of plotters, printers, terminals, and screens. In 1979, less than two years after hanging its name on the door, the Chaos Cabal was reputable enough to get its first National Science Foundation grant.
While still an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, Crutchfield had done much of the work required to get the analog computer running. He then built an ingenious interface that allowed it to talk to the digital computers, although they don’t speak the same language at all. On finishing college he started publishing scientific papers as a full-fledged member of the Chaos Cabal, which, oddly enough, caused the university some embarrassment. Having no use for hierarchies or status, Crutchfield had resisted going to graduate school. But here he was wandering in and out of the
physics department, doing research in its laboratories, and publishing papers exactly as if he were a graduate student. Arriving at a de facto compromise, Crutchfield allowed his name to be put on all the forms that would make him an official student.
In the spring of 1978, like the rest of the Chaos Cabal, he diverted his attention from strange attractors to roulette. Crutchfield cut himself in for a slice of the Pie and moved down to Riverside Street to become Eudaemonic Enterprises’ hacker-in-residence. Generally in charge of perfecting the equipment, he also built a third roulette computer. Joining Raymond, the prototype, and Harry, the first of its offspring, there was now a new member of the Eudaemonic computer family named Patrick, after James Patrick Crutchfield.
“Raymond at this point had already been put out to pasture,” said Doyne. “So for playing in the casinos we had Harry and Patrick. Jim made connectors for them, nicely painted and color-coded. He built little aluminum boxes about the size of an address book to hold the computers, and when he had finished going over them, the hardware and peripherals were generally of a much higher quality.”
As computers, Harry and Patrick were completely self-contained, with the memory and logical ability to play roulette on any wheel they chose. All they needed for this assignment were peripheral interface devices, which for the Project consisted of toe-operated microswitches for getting information into the computer and thumping solenoids for getting it back out. Because Eudaemonic Enterprises had opted for a two-person system, each roulette team would have to be outfitted with not one but two computers, and these in turn would need a way of communicating with each other. This was being handled by magnetic induction, which used a wireless transmitter and receiver that can be spoken of, without splitting hairs, as a kind of radio link. To simplify the discussion further, one could characterize the Project as having engineered a two-person system that employed both a transmitting and a receiving computer. These were virtually identical in size, and both possessed a full complement of solenoids, although only the transmitting computer was programmed with a roulette algorithm and endowed with toe-operated microswitches.
The first of the Project’s receiving computers had been built by Ingrid Hoermann as her homework assignment in Physics 107, the basic electronics course for physics majors in which Doyne was her teaching assistant and Norman her tutor. The computer was christened, according to Eudaemonic tradition, with Ingrid’s middle name, Renata. A second receiving computer was built that spring by Norman. As the computer Harry already bore his middle name, and as the Project—following the customary nomenclature—considered their receiving computers female in gender, the new machine was named after Norman’s youngest sister, Cynthia. Descended from grandmother KIM and father Raymond, the Eudaemonic family now included four sleek little computers—the two transmitters, Harry and Patrick, and the two receivers, Renata and Cynthia.
A classical pianist majoring in music, Ingrid had been about to graduate from UC Santa Cruz when she decided in the fall of 1976 that she “wanted some sort of general education, and playing the piano wasn’t giving it to me. I spent entire days working on jumps and octave leaps. But it was just physical stuff, without any kind of intellectual discipline.
“I always end up going overboard, being more thorough than I need to be, covering something too far and then moving back to where I wanted to be in the first place. So after finishing all the requirements needed for a degree in music, I put in a request to stay at Santa Cruz another year or two. I told them I wanted to be a sound engineer and study physics.”
Ingrid worked as a recording technician for the music department. She got involved in electronic music performances and other “happenings.” She built a small synthesizer and learned a lot about the physics of music. It was this interest in synthesizers and contemporary musical performance that had steered her originally into working toward a degree in physics. To help her through the science curriculum, Doyne introduced Ingrid to Norman, and the two of them arranged to swap instruction in physics for piano lessons. Doyne also set her up with a nifty class project bound to get her high marks if she could pull it off, and by the end of the quarter Ingrid had succeeded in building her first computer.
“Ingrid learned more about microcomputers that quarter,” said Norman, “than she probably cares to admit, and she got a very good evaluation for her project.”
“Norman is a very talented piano player,” said Ingrid in her own evaluation. “But when it came to tutoring me in physics, we spent most of our time talking about either roulette or strange attractors.”
A regular visitor to Riverside Street, Ingrid soon moved in as a full-fledged Projector. “I had always felt privileged when they invited me to stay for dinner,” she said. “It would be a huge, family-style affair with all these crazy, high-powered, entertaining people. We would sit around the table and talk for hours. They were scientists, but none of them was a nerd. They read books and knew about other things.
“I had never been in a communal household that worked like this, where people really enjoyed each other. Everything in the house was supposed to be run by popular vote, and we had a real sense of responsibility toward the place. We shared everything—food, toothpaste, tools. Each person had a cooking night and was responsible for having dinner ready. There were rules on how things should go with recycling and shopping and planting the garden. We were supposed to talk about any problems at occasional house meetings held at dinner, although it was hard to find a meal without friends over. A job wheel with our names on it listed all the tasks that needed to get done. The wheel rotated once a week, so that everyone eventually cleaned the bathrooms and kitchen or mulched the compost or watered the garden. For the big jobs, like a massive cleaning once every three months or building the fence around the back yard, we assumed the whole house would help. We also hoped that visitors staying for a week or more would buy food and cook a meal. The point was to have an open house with enough room to welcome everyone.”
Given to wearing Mexican sandals, blue jeans, homemade vests, and shirts open at the neck, Ingrid was at once playful, reticent, bold, and unpredictable. With dark hair and blue eyes, often glowering with concentration, she was not attractive in any way appreciated by a culture of coastal blondes. But she possessed another form of beauty having to do with energy and forcefulness of personality. She contained those qualities that the American Indian ascribes to Coyote. Mischievous and easy to smile, she could mimic other people’s mannerisms with devastating accuracy. In her presence one was always somehow off balance, and therefore open to doing completely unexpected things. Resembling a geometric structure verging from order into chaos, Ingrid herself became one of the strange attractors around which the Project oriented its nonlinear dynamics.
“When I learned about the Project,” she said, “it was the best thing I had heard in a long time, sort of like a twentieth-century cowboy story. I was over for dinner at Riverside when Doyne, Norman, and I first went into the Project Room to look at the roulette wheel. We spun it and stood around and stared into it like a fireplace. I imagined what it would be like to go to Las Vegas and play the casinos, and it became incredibly glamorous.
“That’s when I joined. I wanted go right away. It seemed like an alternate reality. You could lead this underground life and skip the eight-to-five world altogether.”
Other than building Renata the computer, driving to the Silicon Valley for chips, compiling histograms with Alan Lewis, and learning her way around the mode map for a try at winning the Riviera Sweepstakes, Ingrid also designed some of the Project’s costumes. “We needed clothes that would hide the computer and still be reasonably fashionable. After rummaging through people’s closets looking for big sweaters and baggy blouses and dresses, we came up with some wonderfully sleazy combinations that Marianne, Charlene, and I then sewed into outfits.”
Radio reception between data taker and bettor required that coils of antenna wire be carried somewhere on their bodies. The Projectors ima
gined sewing antenna cuffs onto their pants or antenna belts around their waists, but settled finally on a design for antenna T-shirts in which loops of wire were worn as a yoke around the shoulders. For concealing the computers, after much experimentation, they developed two sex-related systems. The men employed sacroiliac belts slung across the chest and worn like holsters for hidden weapons. One belt held the computer nestled under the left armpit; another held the batteries under the right. The women wore their computers and batteries snapped into leotards with pockets that fit under the breasts.
“The leotards were a pain to put on,” Ingrid declared. “First of all, you had to take off all your clothes to get into them. They sagged under the weight of the computers and were so tight that our wires kept breaking. We later switched to bra and girdle combinations with hooks running up the front.” Everyone, regardless of sex, also wore a solenoid plate with thumpers on the stomach.
Inspired like Ingrid by roulette madness, Marianne sewed her first three-piece suit. Specially designed for gambling, it had extra pockets in the vest and snaps under the arms for battery packs and computers. Naturally speedy, as if fresh from five cups of coffee, Charlene topped even Marianne in high-energy output. She specialized in word games, puns, and other synaptic leaps, which kept the three of them amused as they rushed into the production of antenna T-shirts, computer sacroiliac belts, padded leotards, rip-stop solenoid covers, and socks with holes hemmed into them.
The Eudaemonic Pie Page 15