Get to Know Algorithms
Nolle’s account ends up turning into a Demonstration of Algorithms, much more than it is a Personal History. He sets up the Akkade on the Coffee Table, attaches a little Screen, and brings it to life. The crackle and ozone smell of Static Electricity are intoxicating. He has a basket of the fine wires for connecting the chiclets together, of which almost all seem hopelessly tangled.
Over the course of ten minutes of poking chiclets, slamming metal rails back and forth, finding a cable loose enough to extract from the basket, and rearranging the plugs of the snaking cables into banks of jacks in the chiclets, Nolle creates an Algorithm on the Akkade. It is a simple one, which lists all of the combinations of two or more Members among the five Members of the House. All the while, he is narrating the process, growing more excited and confident all the while. He explains that each chiclet contains some morsel of logic, and by connecting them together in new permutations one can chain together any conceivable logical process. He claims proudly that the combinatorial and universal nature of Algorithms means that, in principle, one could even create a Mind that thinks just like a Person. Or like any other equally sophisticated but unfamiliar Mind. He then explains that it’s theoretically possible to do all the work of a milliard Akkades, all these wired chiclets on all these slates, entirely inside just one chiclet. But this abstraction and compaction has been forbidden by Authorities, and this proscription mostly respected, in order to limit the influence of Algorithms on the rest of the world. You are beginning to feel the gravity of that, and believe it, when Velle announces that now would be a good time to get ready for dinner.