Chapter 4: Birthdays, Robotix, and a Snowstorm

“Hi, Jim,” a friendly feminine voice sounded from my office doorway. “Did you miss us? Did you even think about us? Wow, look at your suntan. You’re so brown.”

I stood to greet Christine and Ashley as they came into my office. They were bundled up against the cold weather that had blasted into New England over the holidays.

I hugged each of the girls. “Yes. Of course, I missed you, and yes, I thought about you every day – many times each day.” I paused and then confessed, “I even took the Christmas picture of you two with me on my vacation.” After another pause, I asked, “Now, how are you two doing?”

Both sets of eyebrows rose at my confession, and they broke out in beautiful smiles that brightened the gray skies.

Ashley said, “We’re fine. We missed you a great deal. We studied about some important things and even talked to some people about one thing and another. We’re ready for the new semester. I think we’re also ready to test out of a couple of other electives.”

I turned and picked up a paper from my desk, “Let’s see. You’re both signed up for another heavy course load: compilers, software design principles, advanced statistics, second semester accounting, business management, and my special projects course in AI. Did I miss anything?”

“No. We even have all our textbooks. We’re ready for classes to start tomorrow,” Chris said. “We were wondering whether we could study here when you’re not around or when you’re not busy with other students?”

I thought about that. My good angel and bad angel had a quick argument. I said, “Yes, you may. I’ll even get you a key, or do you need two?”

“One will be fine since we’re always together. Thank you so much. The library just keeps getting noisier and noisier, plus we get hit on all the time.”

I got a duplicate key from the building supervisor, and gave it to the girls.

About a two weeks later, I was tutoring one of my junior level students in a course I was teaching about advanced network theory. Chris and Ash had seen me busy, so had taken up residence on a long wooden bench in the hallway directly outside my office door. As I stood at my whiteboard and coaxed the junior through the past week’s material, I could also look at the two teens as they studied. Chris was typing into her laptop computer, and Ash was reading from a heavy textbook.

My attention to the matter at hand all but vanished when two upper-classmen stopped and started to chat with the two girls. They were both friendly, but I noticed they didn’t invite the two guys to sit. My attention went back and forth, until I was able to finish my point. The student thanked me and packed up his notes. I escorted him to the door, and listened to where the discussion with Ash and Chris had gone.

The guys were hitting on the two girls. “Ah, come on. We could show you a great time. Have you ever been in a fraternity house? They’re really nice. We have lots of cool stuff to show you. Come on.”

I was about to say something when Ash intervened, “Look, we told you we weren’t interested. Our idea of fun doesn’t involve a fraternity house or a sorority house.”

One guy pushed, “What turns you on? Maybe we can help?”

Chris stated authoritatively, “Right now it’s the intersection of neurolinguistic programming and artificial intelligence, and the different modalities caused by Riemann surfaces in the half-plane of hyperbolic Hilbert space.” She looked daggers at the youth.

He laughed and teased, “Do you know anything about what you just said?”

Chris said, “Yes. Wanna see?” She turned her laptop to the boy and he leaned forward to look at the screen. Even from twenty feet away I could see the complex mathematics she’d been studying in an online textbook.

The guy said to her, “You’re serious?”

“As a heart attack,” she replied curtly. “When you can hold an intelligent discussion on the merits of the various modalities I just mentioned, why don’t you come and find us. Just maybe, we’ll talk to you then, but you’d better know your stuff.”

The two guys knew they’d met their match. They made departing signs to the girls and wandered off down the busy hallway.

While they were still in earshot, I called to the two girls, “Hi Chris, Ash. Do you want to come in and talk about Poincaré half-plane models and boundary points on the modalities we talked about yesterday?”

Ash said loudly, “Oh, yes. We had some ideas on that and how it related to NLP conversion and the AI modalities.” They both got up and came towards my office. The three of us glanced down the hallway. The guys had obviously heard our brief exchange and slowed their departure, but only one glanced back.

After the girls were inside my office, Chris said in a hushed tone, “Thanks for not calling us out for spouting bullshit.”

“My, my, my, such profane words from such a beautiful creature. My ears are burning.” I held both hands to my ears in mock discomfort.

As Chris walked by, she kissed my cheek. “Oh, speaking of bullshit, you should have heard the pickup lines those two were using. Very sophomoric.”

“I remind you that you are like raw meat to the lions on this campus. If you ever start to date or party, you will be in high demand. You’re both beautiful, smart, and look so innocent.”

Ash said, “And if we’re innocent, just maybe we’ll buy into their line of bull about coming up to their rooms and letting them show us how to have some real fun ... now just let me help you off with that blouse and here, have another beer.” She laughed, and the rest of us joined in.

I suggested, “The liberal arts students on the other side of campus might be more polished.”

Both shook their heads and said in unison, “They aren’t. They’re worse. That’s why we want to avoid the library except in dire situations.”

Deb Summer suggested lunch in an email, and I responded with time and place – a nice restaurant near the edge of campus frequented by faculty. When we met at one o’clock she was all smiles.

Deb said, “I was going over the records of Christine and Ashley, and I had a couple of nice ‘how goes it?’ talks with them. One thing I wanted to touch base with today is your perception about how they’re doing?”

I waxed eloquent about the two teens, and how well they’d done academically, how their interests we’re becoming better focused, and how well adapted to campus life they seemed. I mentioned the Thanksgiving celebration I’d been invited to and how the two girls had cooked and put on a complete spread for their parents and me. Deb reminded me of how they had been perfect hostesses at my Halloween party.

Deb said in a low voice, “You know they have huge crushes on you?”

I waved my hand around dismissively. “Yeah. I’ve tried to deflect that and suggested they find some guys closer to their own age.”

Deb teased, “And you know that’s very unlikely, don’t you?”

I sat back in my seat in sudden realization. “I didn’t, but now that you mention it I can see it. They’re super-bright. They need intellectual equals don’t they?”

“They do.” She smiled, “They should try to meet someone who skipped every other grade all the way through school, finished college in seven semesters despite a bad sophomore year, got a master’s degree in one year, and a Ph.D. in a further year and a half, finishing at age nineteen. They should meet someone who is thirty-three, has forty refereed papers, written four books, become rich on six patents, and has a consulting practice every other professor at this university lusts after. They should meet the most eligible bachelor on campus, and the nicest guy any girl would every want to meet – and if I didn’t already have a Prince Charming in my life I’d be hitting on you on a daily basis.”

I gave her one of my oblique glances, “Deeeeebbbbbb. What are you trying to do; get me in trouble with the law, the university, their parents, and society in general?”

She laughed at her own humor; “I am so watching this movie from now on. This is the best show in town. What are you going to do? Do you like them?”

I nodded, “Yes, damn it. I have very strong feelings for each of them, but I know I can’t act on them. I’m struggling to be a good boy and to be professional. Don’t push me to do otherwise.”

She smiled, “I won’t, but I want updates. They promised to come to me for a feminine perspective on how they feel. I explained the delicate balancing act that you were probably doing, and now I’m sure of it. I think you have an interesting problem on your hands. Analytics isn’t going to solve this one, for any of you. Any solutions lie in the mushy area called human relations.”

I took absolute delight in bringing Ashley and Christine up to Robotix in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to begin their consulting internships in mid-January. I’d brought them as up to speed about the company and its work as I could, plus I’d fed them hundreds of pages of material about my consulting work for the company over the past two years.

The girls dressed nicely in a long-sleeve sport shirt and woolen slacks; both girls had ponytails and also wore blazers. The residual snow from several days earlier mandated ankle boots. They looked nice, but honestly they looked like a couple of fourteen year olds trying to look a little older.

I hadn’t told Ray Jennings, my client, or his team anything about the girls other than I had a couple of women students who were going to join me on the project to add in their expertise and professional contribution.

When Ash, Chris, and I walked into the conference room we were scheduled to meet in there was a hush and then a buzz of activity. Ray kept looking behind me to see where the ‘real’ consulting associates were. I politely introduced Ash and Chris without saying much about them.

The initial purpose of the meeting was for Ray to give the three of us and two new hires at Robotix a briefing on the company’s work for the past six months and his hopes for the next six. He was obviously skeptical, and I felt sure he thought I was about to pull some sort of gag on him. We had that kind of relationship where a good practical joke wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility. That said, I’d never done anything like that with him.

Ray started his slides into their work about wedding AI and their robot, currently a somewhat lifelike female head that fronted for a bank of computers in the bowels of their one building. They referred to the robotic head as Olivia. They were focusing on three major problem areas: natural language processing on both input and output, appropriate facial expressions driven by several dozen small servos just under Olivia’s artificial skin, and rapid recall, particularly for short-term memory functions.

After about fifteen minutes and an equal number of slides, Ashley asked, “It seems that you’re treating each of those problem areas in isolation. Wouldn’t you do better if you were to solve the memory functions with parallel processing and then use the freed up machine cycles for calculating expressions based on what Olivia is going to say next based on a table of emotional responses ratioed to various servo settings. You’d also get better speech synthesis because you can hone the output in those recovered machine cycles. Right now, looking at that schematic, you’re basically using three different computers for each function, but each one processes serially. You might do better by doing them all simultaneously on one parallel processor.”

Chris quickly added, “I agree, plus you could use some of the techniques available in neuro-linguistic programming or NLP in organizing the sensor data related to short-term memory. The schematic indicates you’re treating the sensory data as a serial data stream. Treating them in parallel could help prepare Olivia’s consciousness response at least a hundred cycles earlier at the machine speeds you’re suggesting.”