Mary’s Secret

A sequel to “Mary” and “The Magpie”


It started as a bit of a joke. Mary had no intention of misleading anyone. It was just a laugh and a dare. It began when Mary met Adam at one of those dreaded Rotary Club events: a fund-raising “sausage-sizzle” at the local farmer’s market. Mary had had enough of slaving over the greasy hot BBQ, and had wandered off to check out the other stalls.

Adam was manning a stall for the engineering department of the local university. He had no punters. To be honest, he was not exactly working at it either: he was completely engrossed in his virtual reality game instead of getting people interested in the courses offered at his department. Mary, however, was intrigued by the young man with the strange head-gear. Gadgets fascinated her (back home, she had every kitchen gadget on the market; but unfortunately, these did not make her terrible dinners any more palatable). She asked about the head-gear, and they got chatting.

Adam was undertaking his PhD in computer engineering. He was only in his second year, but boasted to Mary that he had already completed his project for his thesis. He was just stringing along his supervisor, pretending it wasn’t quite ready yet. He aimed to have an easy time for the remainder of his studentship, rather than be burdened by another project.

Adam had invented an ingenious looping sequence that increased current computing speed by over 200%. With a little further tinkering, he was hoping he could increase the speed even more. Mary was unimpressed — so what does this mean? How will it make our lives better? Adam could not believe her lack of imagination.

They met again for coffee later in the week. Adam still had to try to convince Mary of why his invention was so amazing.

While computers are more powerful than humans in undertaking large calculations, they can be slow because computers try to calculate every possibility before coming to a solution. This “exhaustive” search can be time-consuming if there are millions of possibilities. But the final solution will be 100% correct.

Humans, however, learn to make intuitive “short-cut” connections and are able to make decisions more rapidly. So, even if there are a large number of possibilities — humans use their experience to intuitively pick out the more likely routes, ignoring a vast number of other less likely routes. However, the solution was not always correct — so humans could still made mistakes, whereas computers did not.

Computers are still not able to carry out such learning-based or intuitive short-cuts to computing. Computers simply cannot “think” the way humans do. However, with vastly increased computing speed, machines would be more able to make decisions as quickly as humans did — but still find accurate solutions because they are continuing to make brute-force calculations, but at incredibly fast speeds. In other words, computers would be able to react or behave in more human-like ways, but still be powerful in reaching the correct answer.

Mary still did not understand.

So Adam started talking about game playing to try to convince her. Chess was a classic example. Computers would often win when playing against people — but they can take so long to compute the data, and the moves were so brutal (the computers would go for the first obvious solutions rather than more elegant ones, where a little more computing could have led to the latter) that it was usually obvious that a machine was playing. Also, the original chess-playing computers were vast, massive instruments with heaps of arrays, which had to be housed in a space the size of a warehouse. With his new super-rapid sequence, he could use a mere laptop, and the computer’s decision for its next step in the game would be both elegant and near instantaneous — much like a human.

Mary laughed — she had never won a game of chess before, even against her nephews and nieces, so it would not be much of a challenge for a machine to beat her. A calculator could outplay her.

How could he make her understand?

Adam set up a dare: how about he made Mary a chess master? At the university laboratories, he could engineer a tiny camera into Mary’s reading glasses, and fashion a minuscule ear-piece in one of the handles of the spectacles. No one would know. What if he helped her win a game of chess against an expert player?

Mary, of course, was always up for a challenge. What a laugh! Her — Mary Corrinne Douglas, who can barely add up her shopping bill — a chess master. Never!

So now, as Mary was about to enter the auditorium in Melbourne for the Australian Masters Tournament, she felt a touch of doubt and guilt. All those people in Narooma thought she was wonderful. Everyone wanted her to win, and had made donations to help her travel to the tournaments, leading up to this final showdown. One man had walked from Narooma to Cape Tribulation and back to raise money for her. She was touched by her adopted town’s enthusiasm and whole-hearted support.

What would they think if they knew that outside, sitting in a car, was a pale lad with bad skin, wearing a pair of virtual reality goggles? He was seeing what she was seeing though her glasses. The data will be typed into his modified laptop, and in a few minutes he will be telling her what moves to make through her tiny ear-piece.

As she walked onto the stage, wild applause erupted. It seemed like all of Narooma were there. Even her sister was sitting in the ecstatic crowd. The local Victorians looked on, wholly bemused. The opponent was a young Russian, a fresh immigrant, all the way from a land where chess was almost a religion. Surely this small-town middle-aged lady did not stand a chance. The fleeting feeling of guilt that had worried Mary a moment ago was indeed, fleeting. All such troubling notions fluttered away like so many inconsequential butterflies, as Mary was carried forward by the crowd’s adulation.

Let the games begin.


Do let me know if you like the story, or if it can be improved.

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The Enquiring Chook

Written by

Canadian living in Australia interested life, food, travel and nature

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