Page 28 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Archaeontogeny

Cutter’s enthusiasm had been infectious, and he attracted a
number of his colleagues in other departments to participate in this
grand interdisciplinary effort to find the hidden message and subject
it to the most advanced cryptography available. Runyoke’s single
supercomputer, placed at the project’s disposal, was soon humming
with algorithms programmed by the college’s mathematicians to
correlate the content of long strings of junk DNA and known
metabolic processes. The first search was inconclusive: after weeks of
being denied crucial campus computational resources for their own
research, Runyoke students and faculty not involved in this quest
demanded that Cutter get off the system. He did, and immediately
urged his software designers to develop a more sophisticated
program. They did so, perhaps too hastily, and kicked it off again one
Friday in April, the first day of Spring Break.
After crunching numbers for seven days, the now-dedicated
processor needed to be taken offline for preventive maintenance.
The message was relayed to Professor Cutter, who was surprised to
learn that the program was nowhere near ending its run. He, in turn,
assembled his programmers for an emergency code review. Why, he
demanded, had the machine been brought to its knees, unable to
finish a job estimated to require less than a hundred hours of CPU
time? His team examined the checkpoint data and discovered a
curious sequence in the junk DNA. The program had stopped its
normal chromosomal progress after two days while it ran through the
possibilities inherent in that series, and had done nothing else since.
An unforeseen combination of data and logic had started the
computer on a search through the combinations of 512 factorial.
That loop would not terminate, even on the fastest computer ever
built, for several more decades. But the professor could not accept
that cybernetic reality; he forbade interruption of the program.
The manager of the college computation center again called
Cutter. This time he told the professor the running total of charges
for his machine usage. It exceeded the entire budget of his project:
other expenses, including the contracted staff’s services and several
thousand dollars of incidentals charged to his credit card, had yet to
be paid. Needless to say, the program execution was canceled, the
values of its internal registers were lost, and Cutter had to make up
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