Page 86 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Hitler’s Ghost

computational maximum variables—effective CPU speed, channel
I/O capacity, storage and retrieval volumes—set the parameters of
how much can be transformed from an effectively random ocean of
words into an organized pipeline of known variability. That is an
expensive proposition, renting time on a supercomputer: how much
did you say was that advance?”
I quoted him an amount, based, I presume, on a Magnus bean-
counter’s determination of a comparably-scaled project’s expenses on
a state-of-the-art machine. My idea that he wouldn’t feel threatened
by a publisher’s rep was right:
“Yes,” said Roy Ludwig, after cutting a few keyboard capers, “that
would probably cover it. Once it’s known I have a sponsor, others
will doubtless want to jump on board to share the glory—but not,”
he added hastily—“the publishing rights.”
He wasn’t getting excited about having struck it rich. Just another
row of digits, an abstraction traveling through cyberspace from one
bank to another. That couldn’t be me: I liked the feel of cash.
“Now, here is my next, even greater, invention: CATARACT.
Continuing the waterfall analogy, I gave this name to software that
does not need to be preprogrammed to look for anything specific in
the open-ended quantity of texts brought to it via CURSE. That
eliminates bias. All that needs to be set is a level of granularity; that is,
how close a match the filter is to detect. CATARACT is ‘Common
Authorship Theorized After Running Algorithmic Comparison of
Texts.’ One can cast as wide a net as one likes, and the normalized
stream of billions of pages will again split into a vast series of rivulets,
like seeking like with an almost gravitational attraction. As you might
imagine, the coding for this exercise is my own, and has been
copyrighted; it also has hidden fail-safe security checks: if anyone
steals it he will have a lifetime of reverse engineering ahead of him to
discover and neutralize that protection.”
“I see,” said I, misrepresentingly. “So you could put in, say, some
celebrity’s autobiography together with everything written by
everyone else during the same period and find out who had really
written it?”
“Yes, within a degree of probability which, if sufficiently high,
would be tantamount to confirmation.”
84