chapter 1 linus minus and max_17

Chapter 1. Linus, Minus, and Max

Linus liked chess and loved herring. That's why he was pretending to

sleep, standing on the ice, with his beak tucked under his tiny

vestigial wing. He always earned plenty of herring when he played

chess, but today Max was trying to teach him backgammon instead, and

the contrary little penguin wasn't cooperating.

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Max wasn't in much of a mood to fight. Instead, he lounged back in the

lime green lawn chair he'd parked out on the ice and gazed at the

turquoise sky. Far above, a single ribbon of a cloud draped itself

across the pristine expanse. A mountainous iceberg crept almost

imperceptibly along the sea on the distant horizon.

Maybe, Max thought, I should take a vacation.

He hadn't really ever traveled for pleasure. And as he studied the

lone cloud above, he wondered if he might enjoy a cruise. Maybe one of

those trips for singles in search of a life partner. He was still in

decent shape, despite his ambivalence toward exercise. The paunch that

he had begun to develop when he crossed the threshold into his

thirties wasn't too bad yet, and his hair was still thick and dark

with no sign of the bald patch that cursed the men on his mother's

side of the family.

Cash was tight, as always, but he could probably swing the price of a

ticket. Then again, he'd need to factor in the cost of revamping his

wardrobe if he was going to make an effort to socialize. He had

consciously avoided developing a decent fashion sense over the years,

but even he knew that the plaid orange Bermuda shorts, and purple

Hawaiian shirt he was wearing at the moment were rough on the retina.

Max didn't care what other people thought about his clothes most of

the time. But if he were going to take a cruise he'd have to pick up

some new garb, not to mention tiny travel shampoos and soaps, a

folding toothbrush, swim trunks, and a beach towel.

And luggage. He'd need to buy luggage. At least one of those little

rolling electric jobs that seemed like mandatory traveler hardware,

puttering behind their owners' heels as they dashed to the security

lines, and dutifully opening up for inspection before trundling down

the loading ramps. Max had so far avoided ever acquiring one, relying

instead on his ancient suitcase with a pop-out handle and screeching

wheels , to the perpetual annoyance of airline security, luggage

wranglers, and fellow passengers.

He'd also have to put in for vacation at least a month in advance,

pick a cruise package, update his vaccinations, track down his

passport, and apply to Homeland Security for a background check and

traveler's clearance, all for the privilege of riding a boat to

nowhere surrounded by strangers who were probably just as miserable

and lonely as he was.

"Screw it," Max muttered, caving into inertia, "I'll just stay home."

He peered at the sleeping penguin.

"Wake up Linus," said Max. "Come on. Wake up or you'll get nothing at

all."

Linus fluffed his slick black feathers a bit, but otherwise remained

motionless.

Max reached into a bucket standing next to the lawn chair and pulled

out a single flaccid herring.

"I'll tell you what." He leaned forward and dangled the limp fish in

front of the bird. "How about one now, and five if you win the match?"

Linus' beady eyes popped open and he wriggled the toes on his webbed

orange feet, which protruded slightly out onto the ice from under his

chubby bowling pin of a body. Still, he kept his beak tucked away in

protest.

"Alright -- one now, half of the rest if you lose, and the whole

bucket if you win."

It was good enough. Linus pulled his beak from beneath his wing,

scrunched his head down into his feathers, then stretched it out

straight up toward the sky and let out a squawk. He opened his mouth

and waited for his first installment. Max tossed the herring and Linus

snatched it out of the air.

"OK now, pay attention," said Max as he opened the leather briefcase

leaning against his lawn chair, revealing the alternating black and

white triangles of a backgammon board. "It's a game of luck and

skill." He laid the pieces out in their starting positions as he

explained the ancient rules of backgammon to the attentive penguin at

his feet.

"Have you got it?" he asked.

Linus opened his beak and clapped it loudly.

"OK, best three out of five games. High roll goes first."

Linus picked up a die in his beak and tossed it onto the backgammon

board.

"Three," noted Max.

He rolled the other die.

"I got a six, so I start."

The penguin cocked his head to the side and patiently waited his turn.

Linus soundly lost the first game, as Max expected, and did nearly as

badly on the second. Although the penguin picked up enough strategy to

pull through on the third, Max had been forced to make a few

intentionally poor moves to keep Linus from losing interest. In the

fourth game, Linus set up a blockade that trapped Max on the bar. It

was a shortsighted scheme, but pretty good for a penguin who had just

learned to play. Of course that meant it wouldn't take long before

Linus would be beating the pants off Max at backgammon, just like he

always did at chess.

Linus ultimately lost the fifth game and the match. Max stretched his

legs and leaned back in the lawn chair as he watched the penguin

devour the consolation prize scattered on the ice, gulping down each

herring whole.

The penguin waddled to the herring bucket and poked at it with his

beak.

"Pause," Max said, as he pitched a bonus herring toward Linus. It

halted in mid air. Linus also instantly froze, with one sparkling eye

trained on the motionless herring. "Save program."

Max pondered the creature bitterly. Linus was a silly little thing,

cartoonish in proportions and coloring. The choice of a penguin as the

interface to Persky's artificial intelligence program was arbitrary.

There was, in fact, no real reason for a graphical interface to the

program at all. It would have made little difference to the neural

network he was training whether he interacted through a virtual

penguin, or a dog, or even, God forbid, a keyboard. The penguin, the

herring and the landscape were nothing more than visual mnemonics that

Persky claimed would help Max maintain a reasonable consistency in the

training. Privately he suspected it was all some silly inside joke.

And as he sat there day in and day out playing games with virtual

penguins, he was pretty sure the joke was on him.

As far as Max was concerned, he was little more than a penguin

babysitter. And the damnable part of it was, he usually felt as though

the penguin was too smart for him, at least at chess, and no doubt at

backgammon soon enough. It was like being a nursemaid to an idiot

sah-vant in a tuxedo.

He briefly toyed with the idea of checking his messages with Betty

2.0, a mildly erotic virtual assistant interface that some of the grad

students had built. Max had found that a little soft-core porn was

just the thing to liven up email from time to time. But he was too far

behind at the moment as it was. He resisted the urge to call up Betty

and instead reached for a tablet stashed beneath the lawn chair,

recorded his impressions of the match, and reloaded the page.

"Open aversion training twelve," Max called out. A ripple crawled

across the landscape. The lumbering iceberg leapt backward a few

degrees on the horizon, and the penguin was once again standing

motionless before him. Although the bird was an exact replica of

Linus, this one was called Minus to distinguish it from the penguin in

the reward-based training program. A chain stretched from under Minus

where it was clamped to one of his legs hidden beneath his row-tund

abdomen. The chain was anchored at the other end to a spike driven

into the ice.

"Let's get to it Minus."

Max picked up a riding crop that had replaced the herring bucket when

the program was reset. He reached out and swatted the penguin across

its chubby belly. Minus snapped to attention.

"Today we play backgammon," he said as he smacked the crop against the

palm of his hand. Minus tugged at the chain, his head sinking down

into the feathers around his neck.

"Pay attention. It's a game of luck and skill. Five lashes if you

lose," said Max, "and two if you win."

Minus cowered at the end of the chain. Max swatted him again.

"And seven if you choose not to play."

Spare the rod and spoil the penguin, he thought.

It would have been a sadistic exercise, if Minus had been anything

other than a computer algorithm. But the research project was

specifically designed to compare the relative merits of reward and

punishment in the training of neural networks. Each had its benefits,

in theory. While pain often seemed to be a more efficient method, it

was Persky's thesis that the rigid discipline it instilled would limit

creative problem solving. Max suspected a combination of punishment

and reward would likely lead to the optimum approach. Still, he could

see that it was more straightforward to study the simplified models

separately.

Minus craned his neck toward the board in a desperate attempt to

absorb every detail, as Max laid out the pieces and explained the

rules once again.

"Best three out of five games," said Max, "High roll goes first."

Minus frantically snatched up a die in his beak and pitched it at the

backgammon board. "Three," Max said as he rolled the other die. The

penguin's tar black eyes were wide with anxious anticipation. "I got a

six, so I start." Minus dropped his head to his chest and gloomily

waited his turn.

The first game went badly for the penguin, but not as badly as it had

in the reward scenario with Linus. Minus took every chance he had to

put Max on the bar, desperately attempting to disrupt the play even

though he had little understanding of backgammon strategy. Between

turns Minus plucked absently at the white down that coated his chest,

without ever taking his attention from the board.

Even after it was clear that he was doomed Minus played with an

intensity that suggested he was hoping for some backgammon miracle to

rescue him. But it was not to be, and Minus ultimately lost.

Just as Max was setting up the pieces for the second game, a wave of

nausea passed over him.

"Oh shit," he said.

He dropped a backgammon piece onto the board and collapsed into the

lawn chair, clenching the armrests until his knuckles turned white

with strain. He struggled to remember if he had taken his medication

with breakfast as his legs began to tremble and the tunnel vision

closed in. Not that it would make any difference now; the epileptic

storm was already raging in his brain, and there was nothing he could