"David Langford - A Game of Consequences" - читать интересную книгу автора (Langford David)

A GAME OF CONSEQUENCES
David Langford
A DF Books NERDs Release

Copyright (C)1998 David Langford

First published in Starlight 2 ed. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, 1998.

There were two of them in the hot room, on the day that went bad but could have been so much worse.
The Mathematical Institute's air-conditioning was failing as usual to cope with heat from the angry bar of
sunlight that slanted across Ceri's desktop and made the papers there too blindingly white to read.
Through the window she could see an utterly cloudless sky: each last wisp of vapour had been scorched
away.

Across the room where the light was kinder, Ranjit had perched on the stool and hunched himself over
his beloved keyboard, rattling off initialization sequences. ? Breakthrough day today!? he said cheerily.

? You say that every bloody day,? said Ceri, moving to look over his shoulder.

? Yes, but this week we're getting something. I've been starting to feel a sort of, sort of ... resonance.
That's what you want, right??

It was what she wanted. She really shouldn't feel resentful that her frail and beautiful tracery of theory
needed a computer nerd to pit it against stubborn fact. A nerd and a quantum-logic supercomputer like
the Cray 7000-Q, the faculty's latest toy.

Not that Ranjit was precisely a classic nerd or geek. The man was presentable enough, not
conspicuously overweight or bizarrely hair-styled, thirtysomething like Ceri herself. She might yet end up
sleeping with him. Among campus women there was some mild speculation that he was gay, but Ceri put
that down to his one addiction, the one he was indulging now. Sinking through the now blossoming
display into a world of electronic metaphor. The rapture of the deep. She found herself worrying at a line
from Nietzsche: if you struggle over-much with algorithms, you yourself become an algorithm. Gaze too
long into virtual spaces, and virtual spaces will gaze into you.

False colours began to bloom in the oversized display screen as the model of Nothing shuffled itself into
multi-dimensioned shape. ? I like this colour palette,? he murmured. ? Reminds me of being in church.?
It reminded Ceri of a smashed kaleidoscope.

Her virtual-space analogy-maybe some day to be expounded in a triumphalist paper by Ceri Evans PhD
and, oh damn, Ranjit Narayan MSc-hovered on the shady side of respectable physics. Down in the
spaces underneath space, so certain lines of mathematics implied, the observer and the observed melted
together like Dali's soft watches. There seemed to be an entangledness, a complicity between any
sufficiently detailed model and the actual dance of subatomic interaction. Then (it was her own insight, still
lovingly fondled in the mind) suppose one tuned the computer model for mathematical ? sweetness", for
structures whose elegant symmetry had the ring of inevitable truth: a resonance with reality, a kind of
chord. And then ... what then? Maybe a digital telescope that could spy on the substrate below quantum
complexity. Maybe just a vast amount of wasted computer time.

? Hey, how about a cup of coffee, Ceri??
This, of course, was what mathematical physicists were good for once they'd churned out a testable