CHAPTER 157: SECOND MONDAY (2)

"Too soon?" Jack asked with a smile.

He could tell that she was not unhappy with his touch, just that it was unexpected and she wasn’t mentally prepared for that level of intimacy.

She nodded, then jumped down from his arms and hugged him.

There was also a sense of anticipation over her connection, so he was fairly certain that she wanted to explore more intimate contact with him. She just hadn’t worked up to it yet.

After a moment, she grabbed his hand and dragged him around the desk to her side, then pointed at a screen.

"Look, just look at this!" she enthused.

Rina looked like she was about to launch into a dissertation, so Nora chimed in, "It shows how many tests we’ve run and how much of the problem space we’ve covered so far."

"Tests?"

"Yes," said Nora. "Rina, and I designed a program to search for useful nano-structures by automatically generating test simulations and analyzing the results. If we ran these simulations on a Cerebras, we could do maybe one simulation every two to three hours."

"But Jeeves and I worked out a file format," enthused Rina. "Now we can run hundreds of tests per hour."

"I had originally planned to carefully examine the result of each test so I could guide the search program towards more promising areas of the search space, but now we can just brute it. The search program has only been running for an hour, and we’ve already discovered a few pieces of what I believe will make a superior gene editor."

Nora was trying not to grin like a maniac, but he could tell she was extremely excited about the progress she was making.

"Wait! I thought it would take you several days to work out the file format." He wasn’t complaining, just shocked.

"So did I!" said Nora. "But Rina and Jeeves chanted runic incantations at each other for about an hour, then declared success."

He looked at Rina.

"What?" she said. "It was easy to work out the file format. I didn’t even have to write the documentation, just describe each section to him."

He wanted to talk to Nora about what she’d accomplished, but first he wanted to know if they’d figured out how to extract a video stream from a running simulation.

"What about the video stream capability I asked about?"

"No can do," grumped Madison.

"Why not?"

"Jeeves said he has to export the data from the entire simulation, not just a portion of it," said Madison.

"But didn’t he say there would be data loss if the file format didn’t support the level of detail in the simulation? Why not just reduce the detail to nothing everywhere except where we want to monitor?"

"We can, except the level of detail can’t be reduced to zero. It’s sort of like file compression. You can maybe compress a one megabyte text file down to a few kilobytes, but you can’t compress it to zero."

"And there’s so much data in a city spanning simulation that even when the data is reduced to the minimum level, the volume is still more than our computers can handle."

Damn!

He wanted to keep his eye on Kayden and a few other people, but didn’t want to dedicate his soul space parallel self to do it.

"Can we throw more computers at it?"

"That’s like asking if you can put out a forest fire by throwing more shot glasses full of water at it," said Nora.

"But there is an alternative," added Madison.

"What?"

"Just have Jeeves do the monitoring. He can watch the person and write a report with a transcript of dialog. It’s not as good as a video stream, but it’s better than nothing."

He sighed. It wasn’t what he wanted, and it was frustrating that the limit wasn’t with Genesis Heart’s capabilities, but with current technology.

"Could a better computer handle the data?"

"Maybe, but you’d need something with a million times the capacity of our Cerebras clusters," said Rina. "Now that Nora’s search program is running, I’m going to work on an upgrade to it that will enable searching for structures that can be used in photonic circuits."

"Photonic?"

"Yep. Current CPU’s use electricity, not light and are limited to about 5 gigahertz. But a photonic CPU uses light and can operate in the terahertz range. Going from 5 gigahertz to violet at 750 terahertz is a 150,000 times speed improvement!"

Talk about overclocking!

That was a massive speed improvement. The first personal computers operated in the low megahertz range. The increase from then to modern computers was only a 1000 times speed improvement.

But Rina wasn’t talking about a mere 1000 times speed improvement, she was talking about a 150,000 times speed improvement. The possibilities that opened up were beyond imagining.

The tech industry was already ablaze with A.I. hype and tech companies were consuming GPUs like alcoholics at a wine tasting convention. It seemed like much of the A.I. progress was bottlenecked by computational capacity.

There was only so much a single GPU could do, and while interconnects allowed multiple GPUs to work together in a single computer, inter computer communication was glacier slow in comparison. So scaling past a single computer resulted in a massive slowdown in training and inference speed for really large models.

But if Rina could make something that was 150,000 times faster, that meant they could train A.I. models 150,000 times faster and make them bigger and better than anyone else. He could theoretically crush the A.I. market!

And Nora’s rapid progress in nanotech, and her potential breakthrough in gene editing, meant they might already be close to being able to develop a cure for cancer or a universal vaccine.

A burst of emotion from his connection to Madison interrupted his thoughts. She was scared?

He looked up and noticed that Samantha was scowling at Madison, who was still hugging him from behind. He checked his connection to Samantha and sensed that she was not angry, but felt some resentment towards Madison.

"What’s wrong Samantha?" he asked.