Page 81 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Hitler’s Ghost

to sell on the idea of another human being giving a damn about him
and his pet project as any of the other cranks.
He was what is nowadays called a “software genius;” that is, he
could get computers to produce results beyond what might
reasonably be expected of the average logic engineer. It helped these
gurus to have a background in hard sciences—math, circuit design—
as well as fluency in the most abstruse programming languages and
utter familiarity with the current state of cybernetic hardware and
operating systems. That sounds like a résumé, and I had puzzled
through Mr. Ludwig’s, with difficulty and a technical dictionary. His
early career with the government and large corporations soon ran
aground when he found the nine-to-five regimen incompatible with
pursuing his own goals in the field. His specialty was developing
complex algorithms to process vast volumes of data in search of
patterns. Prior to the endless “war on terror” he had worked on
fingerprint and DNA analysis, finding ways to speed up
identification: essentially making shorter work of sifting a haystack
for a needle that might only be the closest approximation to what is
being sought.
Then history caught up with his talent. Suddenly the explosion of
personal data stored in computer files converged with the urgent
need to cut through the noise and trivia of recorded communications
and digitized documents to find plotters of violent crimes before they
could strike. Paradoxically, as the demand for his services increased,
his desire to become part of the security apparatus declined: he had
progressed to the point of finding his own applications for his skills,
and he wouldn’t devote more time to a job than was necessary to stay
alive while concocting ever more exotic, unpopular and mystifying
uses for large-scale “number crunching.” Naturally, from his
perspective he was using the tools of his trade for the advancement
of human understanding and the benefit of mankind, facing, as does
any iconoclastic pioneer, miscomprehension and scorn.
He had made a big deal of his last venture, getting it publicized at
his own expense. It had gotten a lot of people upset, even though it
had never been put into operation—these processes require both a
monumental quantity of data in accessible format and a means of
going through it rapidly enough to come up with answers in a
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