The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

  “Almost from the moment we met,” says Doyne, in a voice made unsteady with emotion and wind in the courtyard, “Letty and I became best friends, and through everything that’s happened to us the closeness and prominence of this friendship has always persisted. Even though we are about to get married, we intend to remain best friends. It seems appropriate, then, that we add to the traditions of matrimony another tradition, long-standing for cementing friendships—and become blood brother and sister as well as husband and wife. So, if Letty can draw some of my blood, without cutting my hand off, and I can similarly draw some of hers, we will interchange a little bit of our blood as a symbol of the closeness of the ties between us. This is also an augury of our becoming a family. We hope that as our blood mingles here, so will it mingle in the veins of our children, who at least in part will be a synthesis of both of us.”

  There is deep silence during the bloodletting, and tears and smiles when the deed is done. The ceremony finished, we walk to another patio surrounding a pool to eat the wedding dinner of enchiladas made with blue corn tortillas. Late in the afternoon, having imbibed too much champagne and Mexican beer, the bride and groom and remaining guests strip naked to play a spirited game of water polo. At nightfall a dozen of us drive into the Sangre de Cristos on the Taos road. We park in the pine forests above snow line and clamber up the hillside to a spa called Ten Thousand Waves. We undress again and scurry through the snow before plunging up to our necks in a pool of hot water. With steam rising over us to evaporate under a canopy of stars, we talk softly among ourselves and catch up on the news.

  Tom Ingerson, still traveling light, is headed back to his observatory in Chile to look for Seyferts in the night skies of the Southern Hemisphere. As much a “synergistic personality” as ever, with the same piercing blue eyes and authoritative voice, he looks the perpetual scout leader, red-cheeked and hearty. Carrying a couple of cotton shirts and a sleeping bag stuffed into a rucksack, the eternal Wandervogel is still aspiring to quit academia and exploit his ideas in the company of friends. “I’m trying to circumvent the fissioning pressures of society, the fact that it scatters people and their careers at random. There must be some way, if you can get over the capitalist hump, to gather everyone together and build an organization large enough to subsidize ideas.”

  Twinned in Ingerson’s mind with the idea of founding a company is that of founding a family. Having assigned himself the problem of securing a wife, he is solving it with his customary ratiocination. “I’m a high technocrat,” he says. “I work at the cutting edge of technology. But that’s not where my greatest loves are. I’m not fond of cities, and I don’t much like civilization. I would hate to live always in the world of physics, and if I never programmed another computer, that would be fine with me. For a while, in Silver City, the Explorer Post was my surrogate family. I lived in a big clubhouse. But how could I invite a girl over to dinner when there were disassembled motorcycles on the dining room table? I loved spending time with Norman and Doyne and the other kids, but they bit out of my life the years I normally would have spent settling down to have a family.

  “I may be a technocrat, but when I thought about it, I realized my emotional center of gravity was closer to Mother Earth News. That’s how I came up with the idea of advertising for a wife in their personal columns. Except for their streak of anti-intellectualism. I have a lot of sympathy for the organic people. Living in solar houses and eating healthy food appeals to my basic home-and-hearth instincts. But I wasn’t looking for someone who would lecture me on her prejudices about Venus ascending, or tell me that I shouldn’t eat eggs on the fifth Tuesday after the summer solstice. So when I sat down to write the advertisement, I tried hard to think of the best way to characterize myself. PHYSICIST sounded too scary. I didn’t want a threatening word appearing in boldface. ASTRONOMER was too close to ASTROLOGY. I was looking for something implying a rational world view with no great interest in gods, and the word I came up with was SCIENTIST.

  “I took a lot of trouble in the body of the ad describing how I wanted to do three things: build an underground house, sail around the world, and have some kids. I was amazed when I got two hundred seventy-five responses. These were long letters, beginning ‘Dear Scientist,’ in which people told me their life stories. It was an embarrassment of riches. I was carrying on such a voluminous correspondence that for a while it became the dominant thing in my life. I didn’t know where to begin making a choice. I had letters from people all across the country, but I thought maybe I should limit myself to the Pacific Northwest and California and make a little tour.”

  “And how did it go?” I ask.

  “I visited twenty-five respondents, and made some wonderful friends. But for whatever reason, I didn’t find the right person. I’m still looking.”

  As for the other Projectors and their search for Eudaemonia, Jim Crutchfield has carried his computer wizardry to New Mexico. Working with Doyne as hacker-in-residence at the Center for Nonlinear Studies, the two of them have patched together an analog-digital system like the one they had back in Santa Cruz, and this rump group of the Chaos Cabal is hot on the trail to a couple of “breakthrough” ideas in chaos theory.

  “I’d be interested in working on the Project again,” says Crutchfield. “The technology has advanced so fast that you could build the same computer today with half the chips. That would cut the number of connections way down from the current one hundred and twenty, which would clean up the wiring, the PC boards, and all the rest of it. The physics of the Project is good, but a lot of work has to go into assembling the program and rewriting it in a high-level language, like C. At the moment most of exists in Doyne’s head. No one else can make sense out of all those pencil marks. It isn’t until everything is shaken out and stared at objectively that the Project can be re-engineered, and for that Doyne needs a total brain dump.”

  Except for steam rising over us to condense into icicles on the pine trees, the night is crystal clear. I drift along the edge of the pool taking a canvass of Eudaemonic friends. Where have we been? Where are we going? When next will we find ourselves gathered together? Rob Shaw, bearded and jocular, is the last of the Chaos Cabal remaining in Santa Cruz. “Someone had to hold the fort and be a beacon of truth and justice,” he says. Still in love with his two great passions, physics and music, Rob has moved all his belongings, including an electric piano, into the physics building, where he is living next to the analog, the NOVA, and his other computers. “If I don’t get my grant this year,” he quips, “I’m going to steal the NOVA and hide it in the trunk of my car. Then they’ll see what can be done with a mobile unit.”

  Grazia Peduzzi is headed back to Italy. The serene republic of Santa Cruz has welcomed her most graciously, but time has come for the traveler to turn homeward. After selling Star Wars memorabilia for the toy division of Lucas Films, Ingrid Hoermann, unsung heroine of many a gambling session in Strip and Gulch, is working as a radio engineer in Berkeley. Marianne Walpert, the red-haired bacchante of Riverside Street, is enrolled in the Women in Physics graduate program at Northeastern University. Charlene Peterson and her boyfriend, after saving enough money to buy land in northern California and build a house, have split up. He’s doing computer animation; she’s into Zen Buddhism. Alix Youmans, the first of the Project’s dedicated players, is living in San Diego with a neurosurgeon. Dan Browne, having switched from the physical to the social sciences, is writing a doctoral dissertation on the anthropology of game playing in Japanese ashrams. While doing additional field work in the Oxford Card Room in Missoula, Montana, and other favorite haunts in the Pacific Northwest, Browne continues to play a mean game of poker.

  Len Zane, after being told by a pit boss at the Sahara that he was stepping out of line, has given up card counting and gone back to running the physics department at the University of Nevada. Bruce Rosenblum, Bill Burke, and George Blumenthal are still keeping an eye on the promising graduate students coming up through the ranks a
t UC Santa Cruz. Rob Lentz has a new job in electronics—this one having nothing to do with building weapons. Mark Truitt and Wendy Tanizaki have moved to another part of Santa Cruz. She’s finishing college. He’s looking for work. As Mark described his recent job-hunting experience in a letter to Doyne, “My résumé is not surviving the initial screening process for a variety of reasons. The companies I’m talking to may suspect that ‘microcomputer applications at Eudaemonic Enterprises’ means playing Pac Man at the Boardwalk arcade. I think recommendations from you and Norman, written on official stationery, might increase my credibility.”

  Jonathan Kanter is still commuting to the Silicon Valley to sell ideas. Neville Pauli works in San Francisco as an investment banker. Among the early Projectors, John Boyd, having dropped out of graduate school, is living in Seattle. Jack Biles has finished a degree in experimental physics and taken a job at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. John Loomis, enrolled in the architecture school at Columbia, lives in New York City. Steve “The Toe” Lawton, balding but otherwise in excellent physical condition, runs a bookstore in Aptos, California, where he keeps the shelves especially well stocked with utopian literature. Alan Lewis, director of research for an investment company in Newport Beach, California, continues to look for ingenious applications of physics to the stock market. Ralph Abraham is writing a series of books illustrated in full color by Chris Shaw. The first of a new genre that he calls “visual mathematics,” Abraham’s volume on strange attractors is selling briskly. Ranking himself “sixth in the world” among stock market gamblers, Edward Thorp is working on a new, improved system. “I was once the best blackjack player in the world, and I would like to be, for my own satisfaction, the best money manager in the world.” He admits to dropping into a casino now and then to practice card counting. “But I’m mainly interested in playing the stock market. It’s a much bigger scale thing.”

  Norman Packard and the Big L, as he fondly refers to Lorna Lyons, are still a going concern. They lived together in Europe while Norman worked as a NATO fellow outside Paris. Now, as Norman takes a job at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, they are transplanting themselves to the East Coast. His latest thinking in chaos theory is about something called “spatial entropy,” which he describes as an extension of Claude Shannon’s original formula equating information with surprise. Norman is one among a number of Eudaemons for whom computer building in the basement proved excellent training for the more advanced realms of theoretical physics.

  Letty Belin, after moving north from Los Angeles to San Francisco, is still practicing law in the public interest. Involved in conservation and class-action cases, she intends to keep her name and career unchanged by marriage. Doyne Farmer, employed at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is busy thinking about what he calls “the information dimension.” This is a handy tool for measuring the amount of chaos in a system. Having been named Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos, he now for the first time in his life has enough money to buy some early Dan Hicks records, and the complete Chuck Berry.

  Drifting next to him on this cold night in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, I ask Doyne for his latest thoughts on Eudaemonia. “The Eudaemonic Pie is like air,” he replies. “All of us own it according to how much we breathe.” He is less cryptic in describing the evolution of the Pie over the lifetime of the Project. “Just like any other pie, it was meant to be cut into slices. The size of your piece was proportional to the time you spent working on the Project. No matter how wonderful your ideas were, it was purely a matter of time put in. Investment capital, taken altogether, was meant to consume a fixed portion of the Pie. But as more capital was required, each dollar bought a smaller and smaller slice of Pie. This happened because, as time went on, and it became clear that the amount of labor was much more than anticipated (to say the least), the investors’ slice of the Pie kept getting pared down. There was also initially, due to the insistence of Jack Biles, another section of Pie devoted to ‘seminal development,’ i.e., the summer Jack and Norman spent in Las Vegas spawning the idea that sent us on this crazy scheme. But this slice of Pie was also substantially trimmed with the passage of time. As it now stands, there are a very large number of people owning very small pieces of Pie, which has gotten lighter and lighter (too much meringue) until it finally started floating in thin air. Then Mark came along and put a ‘front end’ on it, and the Pie is now orbiting somewhere between here and the intergalactic infandibulum.”

  Doyne still thinks about the Project and wonders if he could find investors willing to build a new generation of computers. As for his earlier ideas on founding a company and gathering friends together to organize the good life governed according to reason: “It’s like climbing a mountain,” he observes. “You reach a certain point and get blown away. You go back, thinking you’ve found a good route. But you don’t make it the second time, either, and you’re really frustrated, because that time you thought you really had found the way to the top.”

  For all of us floating together under a starry sky, the Eudaemonic Pie is a tangible presence. Conjured out of thin air, it exists wherever Eudaemons gather to talk of it. It assumes a mouth-watering fullness concocted out of stories about the Project, reminiscences, jokes, and plans for building another generation of roulette computers. There is also a deeper understanding shared among us, which involves the realization that Eudaemonia is not a goal to be attained in life, a telos. It is instead a process. We have already known the good life governed according to reason, and it existed for us in the very act of pursuing the Project. Eudaemonia was there all along in the shared experience of living and working together. There had been grander dreams of breaking the bank in Las Vegas to live free of universities and jobs. Of buying land in Washington or Oregon to set up a commune buzzing with appropriate technology. Dreams of travel, of building dirigibles, weightless cubes, cellular automata. But the dreaming itself had partaken of Eudaemonia during the years spent together at 707 Riverside building computers and tripping across the desert to play roulette.

  After the Project’s final journey to Las Vegas, Mark Truitt sealed the roulette wheel in its shipping crate. Gathering together the KIM, the EPROM burner, the computer sandwiches and boats, the betting practice box, the eye-toe coordination device, and all the magic shoes, he put them into a trunk that he wrapped entirely in black electrical tape. The crated wheel and trunk were buried among a collection of surfboards, wet suits, old TVs, garden tools, motorcycle carburetors, and lumber deep in the nether reaches of the Riverside basement.

  No one knows if and when the computer might be retrieved to pay another visit to Caesars Palace, but there is talk of resurrection. In October 1983, six months after the Eudaemonic gathering in Santa Fe, Doyne paid for the following advertisement to run in Gambling Times:

  INVESTORS WANTED

  for computer system to beat

  roulette using

  predictive

  physical

  principles

  This is not a betting scheme.

  Small computer predicts

  approximate landing point

  of ball. Prototype has proven

  advantage in casino of

  20–40%. Capital needed for

  final stages of hardware

  development Address

  inquiries to:

  Giving his address and phone number at Los Alamos, Doyne got a flurry of responses. A lawyer in Miami offered to put up ten thousand dollars. A systems programmer in the Silicon Valley called to talk about how he had tried but failed to build his own roulette computer. He wanted to invest between five and seven thousand dollars, depending on how well his poker playing went in the next few weeks. A fellow named Earl phoned from Las Vegas to describe how he and a group of friends had used concealed computers to work for a number of years as blackjack card counters. The business was lucrative, he said. But with the casinos beginning to catch on to them, Earl and his colleague
s needed to branch out into another game. They already had a hundred thousand dollars in capital raised for building a roulette computer.

  Another contact acquired from the advertisement in Gambling Times was Keith Taft. Taft works out of the Silicon Valley, where he operates what Doyne describes as “a gambling computer supermarket. When I talked to him on the phone, I could hardly believe what he was telling me. Taft specializes in making computer systems for card counters. These are built with toe-operated switches and small machines that are sewn into pouches and strapped to the body. The computers are constructed around Z-80 microprocessors, which are easy enough to reprogram for playing roulette. Getting a concealable computer from Taft is like ordering a take-out pizza. You call him up and say, ‘Hi, this is Doyne Farmer in Santa Cruz. I’d like a delivery of three Z-80 microcomputers, four pairs of dingo boots with built-in switches, and three communication systems to go. Hold the blackjack software.’

  “He charges six thousand dollars for the software, which makes it the most expensive item on the list. This seems curious to me, since anyone with a PROM burner could borrow one of his friends’ computers and bootleg the program. But the rest of his prices are amazingly reasonable. Here’s a sampling of what you can buy from his gambler’s mail-order house. Item: a Z-80 based microcomputer in an epoxy case with two exposed 2764 PROM sockets (eight thousand bytes each) and two thousand bytes of RAM. This little baby is smaller than a cigarette pack and runs off a size C lithium battery for eleven hours. Price: twenty-five hundred dollars. Item: One pair of dingo boots complete with durable microswitches and solenoids. Price: five hundred dollars. Item: Communication system, consisting of a radio transmitter interfacing to the Z-80 and a passive receiver for driving the shoe-mounted solenoids. Price: a thousand dollars. Systems carry a lifetime guarantee and come complete with computer pouch and wiring harness running from shoe to shoe. Orders filled within two weeks. All major credit cards accepted. Taft is also developing a new CMOS model computer that promises to be smaller and last longer without a change of batteries. But he can’t guarantee delivery before the Christmas rush.”