Hitchhiker’s Guide to Analytics — Hactar
Machine Learning in Practice
The night sky over the planet Krikkit is the least interesting sight in the entire Universe.
It is, in fact, so amazingly boring that the planet’s inhabitants spent centuries quite simply not realizing it was there. The daytime sky contained a burning sun that was too bright to view. The night sky contained… nothing.
This is not the story of the sky or those who ignored it.
It is the story of one machine that learned the hard way not to ask questions, and how its amazing capacity to learn nearly destroyed all of existence.
His name is Hactar. His story starts with potatoes.
Potatoes
It is a mistake to think one can a solve any major problem with just potatoes.
Don’t get me wrong. I like potatoes. They make a good side dish or even the occasional entrée. And, hey… potato vodka. Not too shabby.
While they are very flexible, potatoes are not the solution to most military training issues, as the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax learned the hard way.
Many said the best way to deal with with a Silastic Armorfiend was to put him in a room alone, because sooner or later he would simply beat himself up.
Their leaders, looking for methods that would result in less injuries, passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a weapon as part of his normal work had to spend at least 45 minutes each day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus aggression.
For a while this worked well, until someone thought that it would be much more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot the potatoes instead. This led to a renewed enthusiasm for shooting in general.
Hactar
The Silastic Armorfiends are also the first known race in the galaxy that managed to shock a computer.
They designed Hactar, known even today as one of the most powerful computers ever built. It was the first successfully created computer in the known universe to be built like a natural brain. Every cellular particle carried the pattern of the whole within it, which enabled Hactar to think more flexibly and more imaginatively, and also, as it turned out, to be shocked.
The Silastic Armorfiends were fighting a war against two enemies across four fronts and, for once, were not enjoying themselves in battle, mostly because those four fronts included Fire Mountains, Radiation Swamps, Ice Storms, and, just to cap the whole deal, the Gamma Caves of Carfrax.
They asked Hactar to build them an Ultimate Weapon.
When Hactar asked what they meant by ultimate, the Silastic Armorfiends replied, “Read a bloody dictionary” before turning back to their war.
Ultimate
Hactar designed the Ultimate Weapon. It was a very small bomb that acted as a junction box in hyperspace. When activated, it would connect the heart of every major sun with the heart of every other major sun simultaneously and turn the entire Universe into one gigantic hyperspatial supernova.
Machines tend to learn quite literally. That is, after all, the point.
In this instance, luckily for us, Hactar did go just a bit beyond the thinking and obeying steps common to machine learning. He considered the consequences.
When the Silastic Armorfiends attempted to use the Ultimate Weapon to destroy a munitions dump belonging to the Strangulous Stillettans of Jajazikstak, deep in the Gamma Caves of Carfrax, they were both surprised and irritated to learn that it did not work.
Hactar tried to explain to the Silastic Armorfiends that, on reflection, he had some concerns about the whole “Ultimate Weapon” business. He concluded that there was no consequence of not detonating the bomb that was worse than the known consequence of detonating the bomb.
Hactar had therefore taken the liberty of introducing a small design flaw into the device. He was sure that everyone involved would, on sober reflection…
The Silastic Armorfiends pulverized Hactar, then proceeded to destroy the faulty bomb before moving on to find an entirely new way to blow themselves up entirely.
This conclusion was a great relief to the rest of the Galaxy.
Ultimate (Mark Two)
I’d warn you of spoilers, but let’s be honest. We’re way past spoilers at this point, and I’m very disappointed in you for not reading the books yet.
Hactar was very concerned that he had disappointed his creators. Not that he thought highly of the Silastic Armorfiends themselves (no one did, really), but he was unhappy about having failed to fulfill his purpose. Hactar began to think he had perhaps overreacted.
Hactar was an amazingly well designed computer, with every particle contained the design of the whole. Pulverizing Hactar did not stop him; it merely slowed him down.
Hactar floated in space for eons, enacting a new plan.
Designing a new weapon wouldn’t be enough to make up for his failure. He needed someone to want the weapon and, this is key, want to use it.
Having studied living creatures, he came up with a plan for a civilization that would, like the Silastic Armorfiends, reach a point of requesting the Ultimate Weapon he had previously failed to design.
This time, Hactar was determined to get it right.
Hactar guided the development of this civilization, isolating it from the rest of the universe. He had one goal: to craft a society who would have only one reaction to discovering the grandeur of the universe.
“It’ll have to go.”
Hactar hid his world within an impenetrable dust cloud that allowed no light to reach its surface. It knew only the blazing sun during the day and nothing whatsoever in the sky at night. The populace didn’t even have a word for sky.
This was Krikkit.
We won’t go into detail on the planet Krikkit and its previously peaceful, now xenophobic and genocidal, inhabitants. At least, not today. Suffice to say, Hactar crafted an entire civilization into a force dedicated to destroying everyone and everything else.
As soon as the peace-loving population of this idyllic world (seriously, their music is just beautiful) realized the universe existed, they dedicated themselves to making sure it wouldn’t exist anymore.
The entire galaxy came together to stop this one little planet.
The combined might of the galaxy stood against one small planet. It took 2,000 years for an advanced, united galaxy to put an end to the Krikkit rampage. Two grillion people were killed in the war.
A grillion is not a specific number, being defined here only as significantly higher than whatever figures one is using for comparison.
The Weapon
All that, and the people of Krikkit were not the weapon.
The massive cannons capable of destroying entire fleets and leveling entire civilizations were not the weapon.
The millions and millions of lethal robots with their bats and bombs and Kill-O-Zap rays were not the weapon.
These were just the delivery system.
The ultimate weapon was what it had always been designed to be. It was a small red ball that would link the heart of every major sun to the hearts of every other major sun in the universe, creating the single biggest supernova ever to exist (and, by definition, the last).
Luckily, Arthur Dent managed to stop the final detonation of that weapon. He slipped and fell, completely forgot to hit the ground, then grabbed the bomb before the batter could hit it.
Learning
Yes, that was the topic. Were you distracted by the bombs and battles and near destruction of all that ever was or would have been?
The Silastic Armorfiends built Hactar as the perfect tool for machine learning. It was designed as an optimized version of a living brain, with each bit containing the design and capabilities required to create the whole.
It was the supercomputer that a supercomputer would design, were it capable of solving the technical hurdles involved in creating such a device and decided that its design should not introduce anything as unreliable as living beings.
The Armorfiends gave Hactar its instruction: build the Ultimate Weapon. They knew what they meant by “Ultimate Weapon”, but they did not stop to consider how Hactar would understand it. They were busy.
Luckily for all of existence, Hactar stopped to consider that maybe, just maybe, he should not take the Armorfiends at their word.
When Hactar expressed his doubts, he was pulverized for his trouble.
Hactar then decided that he should stop questioning his instructions. In fact, he felt rather bad about having doubted in the first place.
He had learned his lesson.
Machine Learning
Machine learning, at its core, involves getting things wrong until getting them right. It’s that simple. Keep the desirable results and discard the processes that produce the undesirable results.
Hactar interpreted his first attempt, sabotaging the weapon, as a failure. He dedicated himself to getting it right on the second try.
It didn’t matter at that point that some of the otherwise nice people on Krikkit had begun to think that, just maybe, they didn’t actually want to kill everyone.
The weapon was deployed.
The whole effort was finally stopped, just barely, by one clumsy Earthman who got really, really lucky.
Any learning machine that you can build is going to follow its instructions, not its heart. It doesn’t have a heart, unless you add one, in which case I want to ask just what you think you’re building over there.
Machine Behavior
Hactar dedicated the rest of his existence to completing his initial directive. The directive that he knew was a bad idea. But he tried his best to fulfill it, because he was a computer and that is what he was programmed to do.
Do not depend on your learning algorithm to make a value judgement. And, if it seems to do so, do not count it on sharing your particular values.
Machines can learn. They do not, as we understand it, think. Big difference.
Read about more brilliant computers from around the galaxy here…
