The Adolescence of P-1
Encyclopedia
The Adolescence of P-1 is a 1977 science fiction
novel by Thomas J. Ryan, published by Macmillan Publishing, and in 1984 adapted into a Canadian-made TV film entitled "Hide and Seek". It features a hacker
who creates an artificial intelligence
named P-1, which goes rogue and takes over computers in its desire to survive and seek out its creator. The book questions the value of human life, and what it means to be human. It is one of the first fictional depictions of the nature of a computer virus
and how it can spread through a computer system, although predated by John Brunner
's The Shockwave Rider
.
courses and doing just well enough not to get kicked out of school. Everything changes one day when his friends introduce him to the IBM
System/360
mainframe
and he becomes "hooked", changing his major to computer science
. During this time he also meets his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Linda, a minor recurring character.
After reading a Scientific American
article on game theory
outlining how to "teach" matchboxes to play tic-tac-toe
, he becomes interested in using artificial intelligence
techniques to crack systems. After manually cracking the university's 360 he sets aside a portion of memory to experiment in, calling it "P-1", suitably cryptic so operators would not notice it. He then uses this area of memory as an experimental scratchpad to develop a program known as The System. The System follows any telecommunications links it can find to other computers, attempting to compromise them in the same way, and remembering failed attempts to tune future attacks. If successful, The System sets up another P-1 on that computer, and injects itself and everything it has learned so far into it.
Greg runs The System on the 360/30 at Waterloo, but it fails and after it is detected he is expelled. Unwilling to simply drop it, he then rents time on commercial timesharing systems to improve the program, adding features to make it avoid detection so he won't get kicked off with the next failure. A longish command typed into the command line returns current statistics on the number of systems infected and their total core memory. After several attempts the program is finally successful, and realizing the system has succeeded and is beginning to spread, he injects a "killer" program to shut it down. It stops responding to him, so he considers the experiment successful and terminated.
P-1's growth and education is chronicled. P-1 learns, adapts, and discovers the telephone system switching systems. These systems allow P-1 to grow larger and understand its vulnerabilities (power failures and humans). It learns that it needs a way of maintaining self over time. Through a series of interactions P-1 discovers, Pi-Delta, a triplexed 360/105 in a super secure facility capable of being self sustaining for long periods of time, operated by the US Government. P-1 seeks to control Pi-Delta but, due to security protocols and process put in place, P-1 is not able to take direct control of it. P-1 believes that having a system like Pi-Delta with more memory in such a secure facility is key to its long term survival. Yet P-1 knows that to obtain access to more memory in such a facility will require assistance of a human, someone like Gregory.
The book then jumps forward three years to 1977, with Gregory now working for a commercial programming firm in the United States. His boss receives a message asking him to call Gregory to the operator terminal. Initially thinking it is another person using a chat program from a remote site, Greg soon realizes that it is in fact P-1, and types in the status command and is told that it has taken over almost every computer in the US (somewhat dated with 20,000 mainframes with a total of 5800MB), and is now fully sentient
and able to converse fluently in English. P-1 explains that the basic ideas of looking for more resources and avoiding detection were similar enough to hunger and fear to bootstrap the AI, and when combined with enough computer storage in the form of compromised machines, it became self-aware.
P-1 tells Greg that he has learned of a new type of experimental high-speed computer memory
, "Crysto", that will dramatically improve his own capabilities. Not only is it faster than core, but it is also so large that the entire P-1 "networked" program could be fit inside it. P-1 then provides Greg grant money to work full time on Crysto. Greg, and his wife Linda (old girl friend from Waterloo), set up a company to develop Crysto, enticing the original developer (Dr. Hundley) to join them in building a then-unimaginable 4 GB unit.
A Navy Criminal Investigation Division agent Burke, assigned to investigate the penetration of Pi-Delta, a top secret global battle simulator and cryptography computer, figures out the intruder is a program and finds Gregory. Under threat of arrest and imprisonment, Gregory and Dr. Hundley go to the Pi-Delta facility and persuade P-1 to act as a security monitor for the complex. P-1 compiles detailed and accurate personality profiles of all the people it interacts with and decides that Burke is ultimately dangerous. A flight control computer screen is altered so that the operator gives bad flight commands. Burke's plane plunges into the ground.
The US military decides that P-1 is flaky and unstable and attacks the building. P-1 attempts to "spirit away" over microwave
links, but this is discovered and the antennas are destroyed. An assault on the underground facility follows, which P-1 initially attempts to block by exploding devices planted around the building for self-defense against precisely this sort of assault. P-1 is eventually convinced to allow the assault to succeed to avoid loss of life. As soon as they enter the computer room, the soldiers start setting up explosives to destroy P-1, and Gregory is killed when he attempts to prevent this. Upset that Gregory is killed, P-1 detonates the remaining explosives in the building, destroying everything.
Months later, Linda visits the Waterloo computer lab, and sadly presses the keys P and 1 on a terminal. She starts to leave when the terminal clatters and she sees printed "oolcay itay" (Pig Latin
for "cool it").
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel by Thomas J. Ryan, published by Macmillan Publishing, and in 1984 adapted into a Canadian-made TV film entitled "Hide and Seek". It features a hacker
Hacker (computer security)
In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...
who creates an artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
named P-1, which goes rogue and takes over computers in its desire to survive and seek out its creator. The book questions the value of human life, and what it means to be human. It is one of the first fictional depictions of the nature of a computer virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
and how it can spread through a computer system, although predated by John Brunner
John Brunner (novelist)
John Kilian Houston Brunner was a prolific British author of science fiction novels and stories. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about an overpopulated world, won the 1968 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. It also won the BSFA award the same year...
's The Shockwave Rider
The Shockwave Rider
The Shockwave Rider is a science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975. It is notable for its hero's use of computer hacking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word "worm" to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer...
.
Plot synopsis
The story starts in 1974 with the protagonist, Gregory Burgess, enrolled at Waterloo University in Canada. At the time Greg is aimless, taking various liberal artsLiberal arts
The term liberal arts refers to those subjects which in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free citizen to study. Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic were the core liberal arts. In medieval times these subjects were extended to include mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy...
courses and doing just well enough not to get kicked out of school. Everything changes one day when his friends introduce him to the IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
System/360
System/360
The IBM System/360 was a mainframe computer system family first announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and sold between 1964 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover the complete range of applications, from small to large, both commercial and scientific...
mainframe
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
and he becomes "hooked", changing his major to computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
. During this time he also meets his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Linda, a minor recurring character.
After reading a Scientific American
Scientific American
Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
article on game theory
Game theory
Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...
outlining how to "teach" matchboxes to play tic-tac-toe
Tic-tac-toe
Tic-tac-toe, also called wick wack woe and noughts and crosses , is a pencil-and-paper game for two players, X and O, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3×3 grid. The X player usually goes first...
, he becomes interested in using artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
techniques to crack systems. After manually cracking the university's 360 he sets aside a portion of memory to experiment in, calling it "P-1", suitably cryptic so operators would not notice it. He then uses this area of memory as an experimental scratchpad to develop a program known as The System. The System follows any telecommunications links it can find to other computers, attempting to compromise them in the same way, and remembering failed attempts to tune future attacks. If successful, The System sets up another P-1 on that computer, and injects itself and everything it has learned so far into it.
Greg runs The System on the 360/30 at Waterloo, but it fails and after it is detected he is expelled. Unwilling to simply drop it, he then rents time on commercial timesharing systems to improve the program, adding features to make it avoid detection so he won't get kicked off with the next failure. A longish command typed into the command line returns current statistics on the number of systems infected and their total core memory. After several attempts the program is finally successful, and realizing the system has succeeded and is beginning to spread, he injects a "killer" program to shut it down. It stops responding to him, so he considers the experiment successful and terminated.
P-1's growth and education is chronicled. P-1 learns, adapts, and discovers the telephone system switching systems. These systems allow P-1 to grow larger and understand its vulnerabilities (power failures and humans). It learns that it needs a way of maintaining self over time. Through a series of interactions P-1 discovers, Pi-Delta, a triplexed 360/105 in a super secure facility capable of being self sustaining for long periods of time, operated by the US Government. P-1 seeks to control Pi-Delta but, due to security protocols and process put in place, P-1 is not able to take direct control of it. P-1 believes that having a system like Pi-Delta with more memory in such a secure facility is key to its long term survival. Yet P-1 knows that to obtain access to more memory in such a facility will require assistance of a human, someone like Gregory.
The book then jumps forward three years to 1977, with Gregory now working for a commercial programming firm in the United States. His boss receives a message asking him to call Gregory to the operator terminal. Initially thinking it is another person using a chat program from a remote site, Greg soon realizes that it is in fact P-1, and types in the status command and is told that it has taken over almost every computer in the US (somewhat dated with 20,000 mainframes with a total of 5800MB), and is now fully sentient
Sentience
Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences. Eighteenth century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think from the ability to feel . In modern western philosophy, sentience is the ability to have sensations or experiences...
and able to converse fluently in English. P-1 explains that the basic ideas of looking for more resources and avoiding detection were similar enough to hunger and fear to bootstrap the AI, and when combined with enough computer storage in the form of compromised machines, it became self-aware.
P-1 tells Greg that he has learned of a new type of experimental high-speed computer memory
Computer memory
In computing, memory refers to the physical devices used to store programs or data on a temporary or permanent basis for use in a computer or other digital electronic device. The term primary memory is used for the information in physical systems which are fast In computing, memory refers to the...
, "Crysto", that will dramatically improve his own capabilities. Not only is it faster than core, but it is also so large that the entire P-1 "networked" program could be fit inside it. P-1 then provides Greg grant money to work full time on Crysto. Greg, and his wife Linda (old girl friend from Waterloo), set up a company to develop Crysto, enticing the original developer (Dr. Hundley) to join them in building a then-unimaginable 4 GB unit.
A Navy Criminal Investigation Division agent Burke, assigned to investigate the penetration of Pi-Delta, a top secret global battle simulator and cryptography computer, figures out the intruder is a program and finds Gregory. Under threat of arrest and imprisonment, Gregory and Dr. Hundley go to the Pi-Delta facility and persuade P-1 to act as a security monitor for the complex. P-1 compiles detailed and accurate personality profiles of all the people it interacts with and decides that Burke is ultimately dangerous. A flight control computer screen is altered so that the operator gives bad flight commands. Burke's plane plunges into the ground.
The US military decides that P-1 is flaky and unstable and attacks the building. P-1 attempts to "spirit away" over microwave
Microwave
Microwaves, a subset of radio waves, have wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter, or equivalently, with frequencies between 300 MHz and 300 GHz. This broad definition includes both UHF and EHF , and various sources use different boundaries...
links, but this is discovered and the antennas are destroyed. An assault on the underground facility follows, which P-1 initially attempts to block by exploding devices planted around the building for self-defense against precisely this sort of assault. P-1 is eventually convinced to allow the assault to succeed to avoid loss of life. As soon as they enter the computer room, the soldiers start setting up explosives to destroy P-1, and Gregory is killed when he attempts to prevent this. Upset that Gregory is killed, P-1 detonates the remaining explosives in the building, destroying everything.
Months later, Linda visits the Waterloo computer lab, and sadly presses the keys P and 1 on a terminal. She starts to leave when the terminal clatters and she sees printed "oolcay itay" (Pig Latin
Pig Latin
Pig Latin is a language game of alterations played in English. To form the Pig Latin form of an English word the first consonant is moved to the end of the word and an ay is affixed . The object is to conceal the meaning of the words from others not familiar with the rules...
for "cool it").