Free The Trilisk AI by Michael McCloskey Page A

of exactly what the Trilisks were
and what they did. Kirizzo had made it much further on that front, despite the
fact that the Terran homeworld was itself a Trilisk outpost. After examining
their history, he was sure of that. If Kirizzo had more of a sense of
compassion, he would have felt sad for them. As it was, he considered it a
study in failure, but whether it was a failure of the Trilisks’ plan to help
the Terrans, or a failure of the Trilisks to seize Terra for themselves,
Kirizzo hadn’t quite figured out yet.
    Telisa
and Magnus would have to go into his house and retrieve the industrial seed.
The odds of their success were hard to calculate, but it was easy to see that
they would have a better chance than he ever could. The seed was key to
Kirizzo’s chances to start over again. Without an industrial base, he would be
doomed to spending the rest of his life wandering about in Trilisk ruins,
hoping to get bootstrapped again to where he was before. It would be immensely
frustrating.
    The
Gorgalan alliance’s decision to attack the Bel Klaven had turned out to be a
terrible one. Kirizzo decided to remain in cooperation with these aliens, at
least until he could regain what he had lost.

Chapter 7
     
    “I
assume you’ve started the search for them. Any ideas yet?” asked Arlin.
Relachik and Cilreth sat in the galley of the Vandivier as Arlin hovered
in the doorway.
    “It’s
too early to say. I don’t think they came back to Earth, though.”
    “I
agree, though I’m only speaking from the gut,” Relachik said.
    “It
will take me a while to get set up. One thing I can tell you is, we’ll know in
a day or two if they’re serious about hiding or not. If they’re being sloppy,
this will be quick and easy. Otherwise, we may have to wait for them to screw
up.”
    “I
heard the UNSF uses artificial intelligences to search for things, and people,”
Arlin said from the doorway. He dodged in and grabbed a snack in the tight
space before moving back out to the door.
    Cilreth
nodded. “Maybe so, but that’s not as useful as you might think,” she said.
    “Are
you flattering yourself or insulting the government?” Relachik asked.
    “Neither.
Just talking about diminishing returns in intelligence,” Cilreth said.
    “I’ve
heard that many times, but I don’t follow it exactly,” Arlin said.
    “We
have artificial minds that do basic computations millions of times faster than
we can. But that’s still not enough, because as the number of facts rise,
meaningful interactions between them explode quickly, forming a mountain of
possibilities so steep that even something much faster than us still can’t work
through it all. The machines can make it farther up the curve than we can, to
be sure, but they’re only about a third smarter than the smartest of us.”
    “If
it’s so much faster, that means each second is a long time for it to think,”
Arlin said. “If you put me in a room for a million years, I could solve a lot
of problems.”
    “Given
a million years you could go through a lot with a small set of facts. But given
a large set of facts, the permutations of all of them, their causes and
effects, their associations... the number of possibilities explodes rapidly as
the fact set grows. It’s a combinatoric explosion. Considering the interactions
of ten facts, possibilities, or events is much more than twice as hard as
considering the interactions of five things. A mind with machine memory,
incredibly fine senses, the ability to think about a hundred things at once,
incredibly fast net connections, and everything else a large AI has, is
confronted with millions of facts every microsecond it’s alive. It has to
wonder whether the third microbe from the left on the rightmost ceiling tile on
the last row has anything to do with the murder of Mr. Mustard.”
    “Colonel
Mustard. But we discard useless facts like that,” Arlin pressed.
    “It
may be useless or it may be the only remaining microbe of