"Lushing it up," he said. "Getting stinking from drinking." He still
likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form
of protest against what he regards as the "genteel" manner of academic
people. "I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat
it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.
Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our
assets in the joints."
What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?
"Restless for going on three years now." His face grew solemn, as
though he were thinking it over very carefully. "I'll amend that
statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for
going on three years. Ever since--"
If it was something personal--I suggested.
"It is _not_ something personal," he said, mimicking me. "Guess I can
tell an old cyberneticist pal about it. Been a lush for three years
because I've been scared for three years. Been scared for three years
because three years ago I saw a machine beat a man at a game of chess."
A machine that plays chess? That was interesting, I said.
"Didn't tell you the whole truth the other day," Len mumbled. "I _did_
work on the Remington-Rand computer, sure, but I didn't come to IFACS
directly from that. In between I spent a couple years at the Bell
Telephone Labs. Claude Shannon--or, rather, to begin with there was
Norbert Wiener back at M.I.T.--it's complicated...."
"Look," I said, "are you sure you want to talk about it?"
"Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve," he said belligerently.
"Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at
the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those
two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for
Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern,
no, Von _Neu_mann and _Mor_ganstern. You remember, they did a
mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker,
tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their
findings in a volume you certainly know, _The Theory of Games_.
"Well, that got Wiener started. You may remember that when he founded
the science of cybernetics, he announced that on the basis of the
theory of games, it was feasible to design a robot computing machine
that would play a better than average game of chess. Right after that,
back in '49 or maybe it was '50, Claude Shannon of the Bell Labs said
Wiener wasn't just talking, and to prove it he was going to _build_
the robot chess player. Which he proceeded withforth--forthwith--to
do. Sometime in '53, I was taken off the Remington-Rand project and
assigned to Bell to work with him."
"Maybe we ought to start back," I cut in. "I've got a lot of work to
do."
"The night is young," he said, "and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh
yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot--it could
beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look
silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic
anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great
day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready
for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in
and taken over the whole project.
"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,
sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight
we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,
and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.
That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got
really loaded."
What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt
happy.
"Listen, Ollie," he said, "for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy
Scout for once in your life."