The Algorithm
Statistically speaking, all of us will die at some point. It’s an unsettling thought, but one that is mitigated with the knowledge that we can live long, fulfilling lives before each of us meets our end. However, I’m the only one alive who now knows, statistically speaking, that 99.87% of the human race will be dead in 3 months.
I’m a computer scientist, well, if you could call what I do “science”. I dropped out of M.I.T. when I was a junior. Dropping out back then wasn’t terribly surprising. My classmates were dropping out like flies to develop the next Facebook, the next Reddit, so on and so forth. One of my friends dropped out to develop an EMULATOR for “Angry Birds”. You know, that stupid fucking app that made a billion dollars. Well my friend’s crappy copycat app made 20 million.
Never before in the history of the human race had so much raw power – technology – been available to the fingertips of the world’s brightest. And what were we doing with it? We were working for Zynga updating Farmville patches. We were creating another terrible version of Windows. We were throwing away the future of humanity.
There is a beautiful idea in physics called the Grand Unified Theory – it posits that all the forces in nature were actually one single force right before the big bang. I knew that there HAD to be a similar idea with technology. With a powerful enough software engine and a massive enough hardware army, we could create a computer model that could predict almost anything. I suggested this idea to one of my professors and he laughed- he literally laughed- at my face. He pointed to a framed picture on his desk of a young man.
“This young man was my student. He is now the vice president of Facebook and is worth roughly $3 billion”. Don’t throw your life away looking to create alchemy.”
That day I dropped out of school. I knew I had to devote the rest of my life to this project. I could feel it in my bones- if I abandoned it now I would hate myself from the moment I woke up each morning to night when I fell asleep gritting my teeth out of anger. I abandoned my student loans, obviously, but I still had living expenses to pay. Out of desperation I attempted to hack a bank. I had assumed that post-9/11 they would have those things on lockdown against cyber terrorism. Nope. $200,000 wired from Bank of America’s internal fund to a Swedish bank account in one of my pseudo names. From there I created a program that would wire that money to 32 different Swedish banks and then wire it to my personal account here in the States at random intervals with various transfer amounts.
So I started working on the program. I kept hitting walls, though. I honestly do consider myself something of a genius just based off IQ tests administered to me in grade school, but let’s face it. Even a genius has physical limitations of how much code he can write, test, and debug by himself. I realized that I needed to make a breakthrough, much like physicists at CERN were looking for, that would explain everything in a simple and elegant manner. I can’t go in to detail here, but what I found out was how quantum entanglement worked. I could create code and have that code create additional lines of unique code, without any direction except a designated end point. In short, I could use computers to create new programs all by themselves.
If this sounds dubious, I understand. Let me briefly try to explain how it works. Humans evolved through millions of years of trial and errors. Presumably, some pre-human species branched off into one specious that had arms, while the other didn’t. The ones without died out, and the armed species continued to reproduce and adapt. Over millions of years and billions of mutations, we have every human, fauna, animal, fungus, virus, bacteria, etc. we know today.
Using quantum entanglement I could do the same thing but much quicker and with computer programs. I would write a couple hundred lines of basic code underlining what I was attempting to do, like create a word processor. The modest algorithm I created would then burst into life creating new adaptations, altering existing code, testing parameters, and so on. In about 5.2 seconds, using just my modest ASUS laptop, this method created a word processor that is a hundred times better than Word. I created a Starcraft 2 emulator from scratch – no original graphics or sound – and it was fucking incredible. I actually had to go in and manually reduce the graphics because I couldn’t find a computer powerful enough to play the damn thing. I knew that this would make me richer than any of my other fellow MIT drop-outs, but of course I didn’t care about any of that.