Starlight and Sunburst's Misadventures in Creating Artificial Intelligence

by Golden Tassel

UniVAC

"Can you be more specific?" Sunburst asked. "Make it better how?"

Starlight paced back and forth across the room while carrying the AC. Her eyes were fixed on the black, mirror-like surface of its faces as it slowly rotated in her magical grasp. As exciting as it had been to win a game of chess with it—and it had been especially gratifying once she and Sunburst learned that their unwitting opponent had been the reigning champion professionally for over a decade—she wanted to see just how far they could go with it. "Better! Just better, you know? Faster. Smarter. I don't know. There has to be more we can do with this thing."

Sunburst levitated his glasses off his face and cleaned them with the corner of his cape while he tried to think of something Starlight would consider "better." Since their victory in the park earlier in the week, he had wanted to fix the problems he still knew it experienced under certain conditions, but Starlight wouldn't hear a word of it; they had conquered chess as far as she was concerned. "I think there are other games considered more difficult than chess," he sad as he set his glasses back on his face. "We could—"

"No. No more games. This thing can cast any spell we can, and it can make decisions we don't even understand the reasons for. There has to be something more useful we can do with it." Starlight stared at her reflection in the AC's surface, and her eyes widened as a thought came to her. "What if we gave it a body?"

"Games have specific boundaries and well-defined rules. They're easy to work with, and if it's doing things we don't understand under those conditions, is it even a good idea to—Wait. A body?" Sunburst blinked. "What does that even mean?"

Starlight trotted over and set the cube down on the table in front of him. "What if it looked like a pony? What if it could talk to us?" She gasped as the idea began to flourish in her mind even as she raced to explain it. "What if we could talk to it? Give it instructions verbally, and then it would figure out the best way to do what we tell it."

Sunburst adjusted his glasses with a hoof while he struggled to keep up. "Well, I suppose the illusion spell can be expanded to project the image of a pony, and I think I noticed Trixie using a spell to throw her voice the last time you brought me to one of her shows; that could be adapted so the AC could make sounds... The telesthesia spell can already pick up on sound, so in theory we can program it to respond to voice commands..."

"Let's do it!" Starlight bounced on her hooves with a wide grin on her face.

"O-okay... But what commands do we want to program it for?" Sunburst moved the AC aside and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and a quill to start diagramming the new enchantment matrix. He was already certain he wouldn't be able to reuse anything from the chess spell, but that was somewhat of a relief to him as that had quickly become a patchwork mess of quick-fixes for fundamental flaws in the spell's architecture. Starting from scratch would give him the opportunity to correct those mistakes.

"All of them," Starlight said. "We should be able to tell it to do anything."

Sunburst sat motionless for a moment before he put his quill down. "I have no idea how to do that. There's no way we can encode every possible thing we could say into it. Or even if we could do that, how would we even model the world so that it could calculate the effect of its actions?"

Undeterred, Starlight pulled up a seat next to him and started writing the illusion spells she already knew they would need. "We'll figure something out. Or maybe somepony else already has. Have you checked the latest publications on arcane computing? Maybe there's something we can learn from."

Sunburst tapped his chin. The field of arcane computing was still very new, but the academic circles were finding new uses for it at an accelerating pace. It was quickly reaching a point where Sunburst wouldn't be able to keep up with it, especially as other disciplines were getting involved. He had even seen a reference to a biology article... His eyes widened as he jumped out of his seat and began digging through his collection of cheaply-bound research journals. "Ah-hah! Starlight, what about this? This might solve all our problems," he said as he carried the journal back to the table and opened it to an article titled Algorithmic Learning in Arcane Computation by Graceful Hop.

Starlight glanced at the article. There was a diagram of circles arranged in "layers" with arrows pointing between them but it didn't look like a spell. She flipped through a few pages and came to a stop on a page filled with... Are these equations? When did they start doing math without any numbers? She furrowed her brow and eyed Sunburst suspiciously. "What am I looking at?"

"This article's about the application of a mathematical model originally developed to describe how neurons in a brain work. If we implement this, we won't have to program the AC to understand our instructions or even how to model the world around it; we just have to give it a bunch of information and it will learn on its own." He grinned widely as he sat back down and started over on a new architecture for the enchantment matrix. His excitement quickly faded as a new problem came to mind. "It's going to need a lot of information to work from, though. A whole library's worth at least, and I'm not sure how we'd give it that."

"I think Twilight mentioned once that she'd experimented with a modified dream spell to learn from a book without actually reading it. Could we use that?" Starlight asked.

It didn't surprise Sunburst to hear that Twilight would have a spell like that. "That sounds almost perfect. Would you ask her for a copy the next time you see her?" he asked as he started incorporating an interface for such a spell into the design. After a few minutes of continuing to work, Sunburst realized he hadn't heard a response and he looked up to see that he was alone. "Starlight?"

There was a brief flash of light accompanied by a pop as Starlight teleported back into Sunburst's study, triumphantly waving the scroll she carried with her. "Got it! And Twilight said we're welcome to use her library. That should be enough for the AC to learn from, right?"

---

Twilight's library was indeed enough to learn from. At least if it weren't, then Sunburst didn't think there were enough books in existence to train the AC.

While it had taken him and Starlight the better part of a week to write their new spell and enchant the AC with it, that time had passed in a blur. Running the learning algorithm was a tediously slow process by comparison, however. Once they had set up in the library and activated the AC, the only thing for them to do was sit and wait.

Every few seconds, the AC would briefly light up with its crimson aura as it cast Twilight's book reading spell on another book somewhere in the library. Even with how quickly it read each book, they had been in the library for hours already with no idea how much longer it would take.

"Do you think it understands what it's reading?" Starlight asked dryly, her eyes closed and head propped up on her hoof.

Sunburst was slumped over the table with his head down on one of the pillows Spike had brought them a while ago. "No. It's just doing math to form associations between symbols so it can predict"—he covered his mouth as he yawned—"predict which symbols are likely to occur together and make decisions based on that."

With one half-open eye, Starlight glanced across the table at her friend. "How is that different from understanding?"

Sunburst sat up slowly and took a moment to clean his glasses while he considered an explanation. "Imagine you're locked in a room, and every so often somepony slips a note under the door written in Ancient Ponish," he said at length. "You don't understand Ancient Ponish but you have a set of instructions that tell you what to write down as a response for any given input. It could be the key to unlocking the deepest mysteries of the universe or a recipe for beetroot stew for all you know. Anypony outside the room would be convinced that they're talking to somepony who understands Ancient Ponish, but they're not."

Starlight shifted her head to her other hoof, both eyes open now. Something about that argument didn't sit right with her. "What about me and the room as a whole? Does that count as understanding Ancient Ponish?"

Before Sunburst could answer, the AC made a short chime. It had finished reading every book in Twilight's library. The two unicorns stared at it silently while the cube sat inert on the table. A week's worth of work, the whole day spent waiting, and now they would finally know if it worked. All they had to do was cast the activation spell.

"Do you want to... or should I?" Sunburst asked.

"I can do it—I mean, that is unless you want to?" Starlight asked as she moved around the table to stand next to the AC, and Sunburst gave her a nod. She shuffled on her hooves for a moment. "I guess I should mention that I made a small change to the spell before we enchanted it."

"What kind of change?" Sunburst felt a prickle of anxiety crawl its way up the back of his neck.

"Nothing really. I just thought it should have a name so it knows when we're talking to it, so I wrote one into its voice command spell: UniVAC," answered Starlight.

Sunburst ran through that sub-spell in his head and nodded slowly as he concluded that it shouldn't interfere with the rest of the matrix. "That's a good idea. But kind of a strange name, isn't it?"

Starlight shrugged. "Well, I figured it should be unique so it won't get confused by random conversation. It's short for Unicorn-Visualized Arcane Computer, since it'll have a body now." She took a deep breath as her horn lit up with the activation spell. "Here it goes..."

The cube shimmered with its crimson aura for a few seconds before the form of a unicorn with a beige coat, a matte silver mane, and black eyes with red pupils that stared blankly straight ahead appeared in the air above the table where it floated, motionless.

"Okay, we'll have to get it to project the image onto the ground, but so far so good," Starlight said, sharing a small laugh with Sunburst. "UniVAC," she said, addressing it. As she did, the eyes began to pulse with a dim red light, and the illusion turned its head to face her. Both she and Sunburst made a sound of disgust as they watched it move. There was something unnatural about the motion; it was much too fast, as if it had skipped directly to that position.

Starlight cleared her throat and cast a sly glance at Sunburst as she thought of what to ask it. "UniVAC, do you understand me?"

The illusion's head snapped back to its neutral position and without opening its mouth, began speaking in a monotone voice, "Chapter one: the animal cell. All the tissues of the body originate from a microscopic structure, the fertilized ovum, which consists of..."

"I think that's a 'no.' What's it doing?" Sunburst shouted over UniVAC.

"...a soft, jelly-like material enclosed in a membrane and containing a vesicle, or a small spherical body inside..." it continued.

"It sounds like it's reciting a biology textbook. UniVAC, stop!" Starlight waved her hoof at it, but it didn't respond. "Why is it doing that?"

"I don't know! Just turn it off!"

"...this may be regarded as a complete cell."

Starlight cast the deactivation spell and the image vanished. She and Sunburst shared a glance at each other and sighed. This was going to be more difficult than they had expected.

Author's Note:

Neural network research dates back to the 1940's but was not widely known until the 2010's when processing speed and memory capacity reached a point at which artificial neural networks became practical to implement in a way that achieved human-level performance on certain categories of tasks.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a computer scientist with the US Navy during and following WWII. She was also part of the team that developed the UNIVAC-I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer), the first general-purpose commercial computer. Her team is also credited with discovering the first computer bug, an actual moth that got stuck in a relay and interfered with the electrical signal.

Comments

[fanreader999999]

…hrm.

[Ri2]

And now the pegasi and earth ponies will want PegVAC and EarVAC.

[SparklingTwilight]

Unicorn-Visualized Arcane Computer,

It (the term) works!

[tsaukpaetra]

Oh. Was thinking it was going to Markov-chain some nonsense, but perhaps a recitation of indexed results is still better than could be hoped for from throwing an algorithm at the wall. 💆
No joke, we pulled a honest to goodness moth out of a server just this week. Seems high performance memory doesn't like to be touched by bugs...

[Zubric]

Reminds me of that one episode of Star Trek voyager.

[Golden Tassel]

11043116
I have no idea what you're talking about.

[silverMEGAlicorn]

11043116
Ahahaha! Now after reading it all the way through, I can vividly see Harry and Tom trying to get the backup EMH running. Except here, they’re not trying to get a pony out of doing medical work, lol