1.10
Post-Encounter Deposition
Aram Schiller, MSCS
Deputy Chief Technology Officer,
Searchable Logic Corporation
I talked to the ship’s doctor, Rachael Lee, and she told me she could not detect any sign of the Beings’ anatomy. No orifices or sense organs, no indication of their internal organization. “They are blanks,” she told me, as she was putting me back into hibernation. It was the last thing anyone said to me on that mission.
So it’s a good thing I was there, because the good doctor was looking for structure in the wrong place. I submit the Beings are best understood as computing systems rather than organisms.
As the volume of information in a space increases, the time and energy required to sort or index or search the information goes up geometrically, meaning it’s not only exponential, but the exponent itself increases. Computer science is all about shortcuts, and if we are really clever we can shave that geometric time down to merely exponential or, in certain special cases, logarithmic time. But, for very large volumes, the problem still gets intractable very quickly.
The easiest way to solve an intractable problem is to sidestep it completely. Don’t sort the information. Don’t index it, don’t search it. A spreadsheet operates this way; each node or cell is affected by the cells around it; change one, and the changes can propagate throughout the entire system. There is no difference between the memory and the computation, which puts spreadsheets in a class of systems we call cellular automata. Lots of real-world problems can be solved this way, such as fluid dynamics simulations of the flow around aircraft or submarines. The problem with cellular automata is that they have no defined end state; they’ll just keep going forever if you let them. But they are self-contained, and infinitely scalable, which is good.
Another shortcut is the learning network, which doesn’t ever really store information per se. It just adjusts its own structure to account for the information, so that when a particular stimulus is received, that information can be regurgitated without the system ever having to index it, or really “know” it at all.
More recently, there has been tremendous progress in the field of quantum-holographic processing or QHP, which extends the massively parallel structure of cellular automata into large, multidimensional spaces. QHP has most of the advantages of both cellular automata and learning networks, with an added advantage of tremendous speed and very low energy consumption. But of course those quantum states are fragile, even at very low temperatures, and most of the hardware in these systems is geared toward staving off decoherence for as long as possible.
The ultimate goal of all of these systems is what we call “domain-specific omniscience.” This means, basically, that you can know everything, given enough energy and a long enough span of time, or you can know any single thing instantly, in zero time, for free. This doesn’t actually exist—it’s hypothetical, a thought experiment—but you can show algorithmically that certain architectures approach domain-specific omniscience.
With all of that in mind, you’ll understand me when I say: the Beings appear to be omniscience engines of a sort we have not imagined. Like a QHP engine, they sidestep any search or index of the information inside them, but their domain-specificity is four-dimensional. Everything they know, they know instantly, or almost instantly, and with a negligible expenditure of energy. But they are finite—every bit as finite as the memory in your eyeglasses. Their capacity is bogglingly large by human standards, but if I understood their transmission correctly, that capacity has to be allocated, dynamically in real time, across the axes of a four-dimensional hyperspace. The result is a novel, computationally efficient system that “sees” and “knows” everything going on inside it.
I was less clear about the hardware situation. Here I have to agree with Doctor Lee, that the “bodies” of the Beings gave no indication of having any ability to support this computing architecture. The best I can do is speculate that the hypersphere subducted by any given Being is essentially “written onto” the 4D universe by a structure that is “outside” of it, and impossible for us to perceive.
To make a very crude analogy, if you are a drawing on a sheet of paper, you cannot “point to” the pen that draws you, or the mind that moves the pen. And if that mind somehow linked to your own for a few minutes, well, that would be a hard thing to make sense of, and even harder to describe. And why bother even trying? If there are answers to be found from this Encounter, I think computer science is where we will find them.