"Richard Powers - Galatea 22" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

living by writing code. But a neural net, I learned in browsing the web, resembled nothing I'd ever
programmed in my coding days. Neural networkers no longer wrote out procedures or specified machine
behaviors. They dis-pensed with comprehensive flowcharts and instructions. Rather, they used a mass of
separate processors to simulate connected brain cells. They taught communities of these independent,
decision-making units how to modify their own connections. Then they stepped back and watched their
synthetic neurons sort and associate external stimuli.
Each of these neurodes connected to several others, perhaps even to all other neurodes in the net.
When one fired, it sent a signal down along its variously weighted links. A receiving neurode added this
signal's weight to its other continuous inputs. It tested the composite signal, sometimes with fuzzy logic,
against a shifting threshold. Fire or not? Surprises emerged with scaling up the switchboard.
Nowhere did the programmer determine the outcome. She wrote no algorithm. The decisions of
these simulated cells arose from their own internal and continuously changing states.
Each decision to fire sent a new signal rippling through the elec-tronic net. More: firings looped back
into the net, resetting the signal weights and firing thresholds. The tide of firings bound the whole
chaotically together. By strengthening or weakening its own synapses, the tangle of junctions could
remember. At grosser levels, the net mimicked andтАФwho knew?тАФperhaps reenacted associative
learning.
Neural networkers grouped their squads of faked-up cells together in layers. An input layer fronted
on the boundless outdoors. Across the connective brambles, an opposite squad formed the door where
the ghost in the machine got out. Between these, the tool kit of sim-ulated thought. In the so-called
hidden layers lay all the knotted space where the net, and networkers like Lentz, associated.
The field went by the nickname of connectionism. Piqued, I sub-scribed to the web's discussion
group on the subject. Reading made good counterpoint to my final rewrite. It was also a great
day-waster and delaying tactic. Studying postponed the time when I'd no longer have any rewrite to
counterpoint.
Now, whenever I logged on to the system, a new round of notes on the topic greeted me from all
quarters. Several of my fellow visitors at the Center took part, firing messages back and forth to
intercon-tinental colleagues. But unless this Lentz signed on with a pseudo-nym, he seemed to cut a wide
side step around the citizens band. "
I followed the exchange. The regulars took on personalities. The Danish renegade. The Berkeley
genius provocateur. Slow and Steady, respected co-authors, in constant battle with their archrival,
Flash-in-the-Pan. Some speculated. Others graciously deflated. I saw myself as a character in this
endless professional convention: the Literary Lurker. Novice symposium dabbler, who no one knew was
there. But even lurking left a signature.
I learned that networks were not even programmed, in so many words. They were trained. Repeated
inputs and parental feedback created an association and burned it in. Reading that fact tripped an
association in me. The man had been sitting in his office after mid-night, playing the same five minutes of
Mozart again and again to an otherwise empty building. To a bank of machines.
This Lentz, I reasoned, had a neural network buried in that moun-tain of equipment. One that he was
training to recognize beauty. One that would tell him, after repeated listenings, how that simple reed
breathing made and unmade the shifting signal weights that triggered souls.

Some days later, the beak thrust itself into my office without knock-ing. Dr. Lentz stood upright even
more precariously than he reclined. Even standing still, he listed like a marionette on a catamaran, my
office door handle his rudder. Again the summer suit, the last scientist not giving congressional evidence
to wear one. His skin had the pallor of a sixties educational TV host. He looked as if he'd taken
self-tanning cream orally.
"Reclusive novelist living in the Netherlands?" His voice held more accusation than question. An
allusion to a photo caption that had run in a major news weekly. I'd been captured in front of a stand of
palms imported into the Sonora. The text beneath gave my life in thumbnail, now wrong on all three