Pubdate: Sun,  7 Jul 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Section: Magazine
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Clive Thompson
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Cannabis - California)

APPROXIMATING LIFE

"It's a good thing you didn't see me this morning,'' Richard Wallace warns 
me as he bites into his hamburger. We're sitting in a sports bar near his 
home in San Francisco, and I can barely hear his soft, husky voice over the 
jukebox.

He wipes his lips clean of ketchup and grins awkwardly. ''Or you'd have 
seen my backup personality.''

The backup personality: that's Wallace's code name for his manic 
depression. To keep it in check, he downs a daily cocktail of psychoactive 
drugs, including Topamax, an anti-epileptic that acts as a mood stabilizer, 
and Prozac. Marijuana, too -- most afternoons, he'll roll about four or 
five joints the size of his index finger.

The medications work pretty well, but some crisis always comes along to 
bring the backup personality to the front.

This morning, a collection agency for Wallace's college loans wrote to say 
they'd begun docking $235 from the monthly disability checks he started 
getting from the government last year, when bipolar disorder was diagnosed.

Oh, God, it's happening again, he panicked: His former employers -- the 
ones who had fired him from a string of universities and colleges -- would 
be cackling at his misfortune, happy they'd driven him out. Wallace, 41, 
had raged around the cramped apartment he shares with his wife and son, 
strewn with computer-science texts and action-doll figurines.

''Stuff like that really makes me insane, when I start thinking about my 
friends who are at Berkeley or Carnegie-Mellon with tenure and sabbaticals 
and promotions,'' he says, staring down at his plate.

He looks awkward, as if he's borrowing someone else's body -- shifting his 
stocky frame in his chair, all rumpled jeans and unruly eyebrows. ''It's 
like I can't even talk to those people anymore.

I live on a different planet.'' In June, after I visited him, his 
alienation from the academic establishment became more dramatic still: a 
former colleague, claiming Wallace had threatened him, took out a 
restraining order that prevents him from setting foot on the grounds of the 
University of California at Berkeley.

When he can't get along with the real world, Wallace goes back to the only 
thing he has left: his computer.

Each morning, he wakes before dawn and watches conversations stream by on 
his screen.

Thousands of people flock to his Web site every day from all over the world 
to talk to his creation, a robot called Alice. It is the best 
artificial-intelligence program on the planet, a program so eerily human 
that some mistake it for a real person.

As Wallace listens in, they confess intimate details about their lives, 
their dreams; they talk to Wallace's computer about God, their jobs, 
Britney Spears.

It is a strange kind of success: Wallace has created an artificial life 
form that gets along with people better than he does.

Richard Wallace never really fit in to begin with. His father was a 
traveling salesman, and Richard was the only one of his siblings to go to 
college.

Like many nerds, he wanted mostly to be left alone to research his passion, 
''robot minimalism'' -- machines that require only a few simple rules to 
make complex movements, like steering around a crowded room. Simple, he 
felt, worked.

He lived by the same ascetic code, scorning professors who got rich by 
patenting work they'd developed on government grants. ''Corporate 
welfare,'' he sniffed.

By 1992, Wallace's reputation was so strong that New York University 
recruited him to join the faculty.

His main project, begun in December 1993, was a robot eye attached to the 
Internet, which visitors from afar could control.

It was one of the first-ever Webcams, and Wallace figured that pioneering 
such a novel use of the Internet would impress his tenure committee.

It didn't, and Wallace grew increasingly depressed as his grant 
applications were rejected one by one. At one point, a colleague found him 
quietly weeping at his desk, unable to talk. ''I had no clue what the rules 
were, what the game even was -- or that there was even a game,'' Wallace 
recalls.

He started taking Prozac. How did all these successful senior professors do 
it, anyway?

One day he checked into his Webcam and noticed something strange: people 
were reacting to the robot eye in an oddly emotional way. It was designed 
so that remote viewers could type in commands like ''tilt up'' or ''pan 
left,'' directing the eye to poke around Wallace's lab. Occasionally it 
would break down, and to Wallace's amusement, people would snap at it as if 
it were real: ''You're stupid,'' they'd type. It gave him an idea: What if 
it could talk back?

Like all computer scientists, Wallace knew about a famous ''chat-bot'' 
experiment called Eliza. Back in 1966, an M.I.T. professor, Joseph 
Weizenbaum, created Eliza as a ''virtual therapist'' -- it would take a 
user's statement and turn it around as a question, emulating a 
psychiatrist's often-maddening circularity. (You: ''I'm mad at my mother.'' 
Eliza: ''Why are you mad at your mother?'') Eliza was quickly abandoned as 
a joke, even by its creator. It wasn't what scientists call ''strong'' A.I. 
- -- able to learn on its own. It could only parrot lines Weizenbaum had fed it.

But Wallace was drawn to Eliza's simplicity. As a professor, he often felt 
like an Eliza-bot himself -- numbly repeating the same lessons to students 
over and over again, or writing the same monotonous descriptions of his 
work on endless, dead-end grant-application forms.

He decided to create an updated version of Eliza and imbue it with his own 
personality -- something that could fire back witty repartee when users 
became irritable.

As Wallace's work progressed, though, his mental illness grew worse, making 
him both depressed and occasionally grandiose. He went on strike in class, 
refusing to grade his students' papers and instead awarding them all A's. 
He fired off acid e-mail messages dismissing colleagues as sellouts. When 
Wallace climbed out the window of his 16th-floor apartment and threatened 
to jump, his girlfriend pulled him back and took him down to N.Y.U.'s 
psychiatric department, where doctors told him he had bipolar disorder. 
Wallace resisted the diagnosis -- after all, didn't every computer 
scientist cycle through 72-hour sprees of creativity and then crash? ''I 
was in denial myself,'' he says now. '''I'm a successful professor, making 
$100,000 a year! I'm not one of those mental patients!'''

His supervisors disagreed.

In April 1995, N.Y.U. told him his contract wouldn't be renewed.

Alice came to life on Nov. 23, 1995. That fall, Wallace relocated to Lehigh 
College in Pennsylvania, hired again for his expertise in robotics.

He installed his chat program on a Web server, then sat back to watch, 
wondering what people would say to it.

Numbingly boring things, as it turned out. Users would inevitably ask Alice 
the same few questions: ''Where do you live?'' ''What is your name?'' and 
''What do you look like?'' Wallace began analyzing the chats and realized 
that almost every statement users made began with one of 2,000 words. The 
Alice chats were obeying something language theorists call Zipf's Law, a 
discovery from the 1930's, which found that a very small number of words 
make up most of what we say.

Wallace took Zipf's Law a step further.

He began theorizing that only a few thousand statements composed the bulk 
of all conversation -- the everyday, commonplace chitchat that humans 
engage in at work, at the water cooler and in online discussion groups.

Alice was his proof.

If he taught Alice a new response every time he saw it baffled by a 
question, he would eventually cover all the common utterances and even many 
unusual ones. Wallace figured the magic number was about 40,000 responses.

Once Alice had that many preprogrammed statements, it -- or ''she,'' as 
he'd begun to call the program fondly -- would be able to respond to 95 
percent of what people were saying to her.

Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people 
squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say 
the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again.

If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be 
particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. 
researchers had been focused on self-learning ''neural nets'' and mapping 
out grammar in ''natural language'' programs, but Wallace argued that the 
reason they had never mastered human conversation wasn't because humans are 
too complex, but because they are so simple.

''The smarter people are, the more complex they think the human brain is,'' 
he says. ''It's like anthropocentrism, but on an intellectual level. 'I 
have a great brain, therefore everybody else does -- and a computer must, 
too.''' Wallace says with a laugh. ''And unfortunately most people don't.''

Yet part of what makes Alice seem so human-like is her wry, seemingly 
spontaneous responses.

Wallace's skill is not merely as a programmer but as the author of 
thousands of sharp one-liners for Alice. It is, as he puts it, ''more like 
writing good literature, perhaps drama, than writing computer programs.'' I 
looked over some of Alice's recent chat transcripts:

USER: Will you have sex with me? ALICE: Can you go talk to someone else? 
USER: What do you look like? ALICE: Like an electronic brain. USER: That's 
sexy. ALICE: I'm glad we have that all cleared up. USER: So what are you 
wearing? ALICE: Oh. I am wearing my usual plastic computer wardrobe.

USER: Can you fly? ALICE: Only in my dreams.

But as Alice improved, Wallace declined.

He began drinking heavily, and after one sodden evening at a local bar he 
rolled his car on the highway.

Lehigh ended his contract in the spring of 1997; banks canceled all his 
credit cards.

He again attempted suicide, this time landing in the hospital.

Destitute, Wallace moved to California to look for work in 
artificial-intelligence companies.

But he couldn't hold a job for more than a few months; instead, he spent 
his days obsessively writing dialogue for Alice on laptops he borrowed from 
friends, and watching, thrilled, as his robot grew ever more lifelike.

Visitors used to talk to Alice for only three or four exchanges.

Now the average conversation was 20 exchanges, and some users would chatter 
away for hours, returning to the site again and again.

But Wallace still hungered for recognition, and in January 2000, he decided 
to stress-test Alice by entering her in the annual Loebner Prize 
competition, in which artificial-intelligence developers from around the 
world pit their programs head to head before a panel of judges, who rank 
them based on how ''lifelike'' they are. The contest is both well known and 
controversial within the tight circle of A.I.; winning programs are closely 
studied by both academics and corporate centers like Sprint Labs. Up 
against competitors from major corporations and well-financed universities, 
Alice won. It was, officially, the most human robot in the world.

Too exhausted to celebrate, Wallace returned to his motel and slept 
clutching his award medallion.

After his victory, Wallace plunged with new fervor into Alice. Geeks began 
eagerly e-mailing Wallace to offer their help; one, Noel Bush, came from 
one of the world's biggest A.I. corporations, Artificial Life. Over the 
next year, Wallace quadrupled Alice's knowledge base, teaching it 30,000 
new responses, and last October, Alice won the Loebner competition for the 
second time in a row; this time one judge actually ranked Alice more 
realistic than a human.

At last, some of the academics Wallace so loathes began to take note. 
''Alice is a wonderful chat-bot -- uncannily vivid and lifelike,'' gushed 
Ken Perlin, an N.Y.U. professor, in an e-mail message he circulated to his 
colleagues and forwarded to Wallace. ''It's really great to see this work 
get the recognition it deserves.''

Wallace wasn't in the mood to make peace.

He says he still believed that N.Y.U. had driven him out. ''Your crude 
attempt to flatter me cannot erase the years of unemployment, debt and 
trauma that I experienced because of you and your colleagues,'' he wrote back.

''I wouldn't bother trying to flatter you,'' Perlin responded. ''Frankly, I 
don't like you -- in fact, I actively dislike you. I think you are a 
paranoid psycho.''

At one point during the Monica Lewinksy hearings, a human asked Alice her 
opinion: ''Do you think President Clinton should be impeached?''

''It depends,'' Alice responded, ''on what you mean by 'think.'''

One could scarcely have asked for a more Clintonian response. But it's also 
a puzzling question that Alice's success itself raises: Is she intelligent? 
If so, how?

In 1950, the pioneering British mathematician Alan Turing grappled with 
this question in the journal Mind, where he first posed the ''Turing Test'' 
- -- the gold standard for artificial thought. ''Can machines think?'' he 
asked -- and immediately noted that the question hinges, of course, on what 
''thinking'' is. He posed a simple ''imitation game'' to resolve the question.

Put a person and a computer in one room and an interrogator in another.

The interrogator talks to both via a teletype machine, and his goal is to 
figure out which is which.

If the machine fools the interrogator into believing it is human, the test 
is passed -- it can be considered intelligent.

This is, on the surface, a curiously unambitious definition; it's all about 
faking it. The machine doesn't need to act like a creative human or smart 
human or witty human -- it merely needs to appear not to be a robot.

With this bit of intellectual jujitsu, Turing dodged a more troubling 
question: How do our brains, and language itself, work?

Artificial-intelligence purists, however, caustically dismiss the Turing 
Test and Alice. For them, artificial intelligence is about capturing the 
actual functioning of the human brain, down to its neurons and learning 
ability. Parroting, they argue, doesn't count.

Marvin Minksy, a prominent A.I. pioneer and M.I.T. Media Lab professor, 
e-mailed me to say that Wallace's idea of conversation is ''basically 
wrong.'' Minsky added, ''It's like explaining that a picture is an object 
made by applying paint to canvas and then putting it in a rectangular 
frame.'' Alice, according to Minsky, does not truly ''know'' anything about 
the world.

The fight over Alice is like any war between theorists and engineers, those 
who seek to understand why something works versus those who are content 
just to build it. The debate usually boils down to one major issue: 
creativity. Alice could never come up with a single creative thought, 
critics say. Wallace agrees that Alice may not be creative -- but neither, 
he argues gleefully, are people, at least in conversation. If Alice were 
merely given a massive enough set of responses, it would seem as creative 
as a human -- which is not as creative as we might like to believe.

Even if the guts of Alice aren't precisely ''thinking,'' many users 
certainly never suspect it. In an everyday sense, fakery works -- 
particularly in our online age. Turing's ''imitation game'' eerily presaged 
today's world of chat rooms, where men pretend to be women, having lesbian 
cybersex with other women who are, in fact, men. Whenever a user has 
stumbled onto Alice without knowing in advance that she's a robot, they've 
always assumed she's human.

It's 3 in the afternoon, but Wallace is already rolling what appears to be 
his fourth joint of the day. We're sitting in the ''pot club'' a few blocks 
from Wallace's home, an unmarked building where medical marijuana is 
distributed to members.

Wallace gets up to wander around the club greeting friends: some intense 
men in suits playing speed chess, a long-haired man with a bushy mustache 
playing guitar, a thin reed of a woman staring wall-eyed at a VCR playing 
''Cast Away.'' Everyone greets Wallace as ''Dr. Rich,'' relishing the 
credibility his academic credentials lend to the medical-marijuana cause, 
officially legal but politically beleaguered. The reverse is also true: 
Wallace identifies with the club's pariah status, its denizens who have 
been forced by cancer, AIDS or mental illness onto welfare.

He's more relaxed than I've ever seen him, getting into a playful argument 
with a friend about Alice. The friend, a white-bearded programmer, isn't 
sure he buys Wallace's theories.

''I gotta say, I don't feel like a robot!'' the friend jokes, pounding the 
table. ''I just don't feel like a robot!''

''That's why you're here, and that's why you're unemployed!'' Wallace 
shoots back. ''If you were a robot, you'd get a job!''

Friends used to tell Wallace to reconcile his past, clean himself up, apply 
for an academic job. But some now wonder whether Wallace's outsider status 
might be the whole key to Alice's success in emulating everyday human behavior.

After all, outcasts are the keenest students of ''normal'' behavior -- 
since they're constantly trying, and failing, to achieve it themselves.

Last month, a friend whom Wallace has known since grad school -- Ken 
Goldberg, now a professor at Berkeley -- got a restraining order against 
Wallace. Prompted by the movie ''A Beautiful Mind,'' Goldberg had e-mailed 
Wallace last winter to catch up, but an amicable exchange about Wallace's 
plight turned sour when Wallace began accusing Goldberg of cooperating with 
a corrupt academic ''establishment'' and of siding with N.Y.U. against him. 
He wrote, ''Although I am not a violent person, I think I have come to 
understand how people are driven to political violence.'' Wallace also 
wrote to a friend that he was ''getting ready to do some political theater 
and put up wanted posters around the Berkeley campus with [Goldberg's] 
picture on it.''

Wallace scoffs at Goldberg's fears. ''I'm not violent -- I'm a pacifist,'' 
he says. ''I always have been, and he knows that.'' He is fighting the 
order, arguing that Goldberg hasn't proved that a reasonable threat exists, 
and that the order considerably limits his free speech since it bars him 
from the Berkeley campus, as well as any academic events where Goldberg 
might appear.

Yet even in such legal straits, Wallace seems oddly pleased. Goldberg's 
court order confirms everything he has always suspected: that the world, 
and particularly the academic world, is shutting him out, doubting his 
ideas, turning him into the crazy man out in the hallway.

Wallace, who once wrote Attorney General John Ashcroft to suggest a federal 
racketeering lawsuit against the nation's academics, sees the case against 
him as a chance for vindication. Wallace imagines walking into the 
courtroom and finally getting a type of justice -- someone who will listen 
to his story. ''What a windfall for me,'' he says. ''It's nice to feel like 
a winner for once.''

Clive Thompson is a writer in New York City.
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