I Tube | Kara: A Quantic Dream

Just so you know, this news is not news. It's months and months old - from way back when in March 2012 - but until very recently, I'd managed to completely miss it. Maybe you had too.

I suppose the reason I overlooked it initially was a case of crossed wires. After all, Kara purports to be a tech demo from the team at Quantic Dream — who developed Heavy Rain, one of my favourite games in recent memory. But be that as it may, I've been burned by tech demos often enough that I've taught myself to turn the other cheek when they appear... even when they come from top-notch developers, as in this case.

Kara, however, is as much a movie as it is a tech demo. A short movie, admittedly. That the whole thing's running in real-time on a PS3 is impressive, certainly, but come to Kara for the title character and the heartbreaking narrative rather than some aspirational demonstration of the quality of tomorrow's graphics or performance capture.

Kara put me in mind of nothing so much as The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang, which I reviewed here on The Speculative Scotsman a year or so ago. Set seven minutes of your grind aside and you'll surely see why:

To my mind, this so-called tech demo attests to the storytelling prowess of the creative leads at Quantic Dream at least as much as it does the engine they're building their next game with... whatever it is.

Tell you what, though... after Heavy Rain, and this minor magnificence, I have my fingers firmly crossed we'll hear more about the team's next project in a few short weeks at E3.

Which reminds me: what are you hoping to see revealed at this year's expo?

Give me Bioshock: Infinite, Half-Life 3, GTA5 and a bit of Bungie's next project, and I'll come home a happy camper.

Remember, I tube so you don't have to!

Giving The Game Away | The Winning Robot Riddle

Well, the Gears of War 3 multiplayer beta code is gone. Went like that!

But it occurs I've still to announce who won last week's rather fabulous freebie. To refresh your recollection, here's the original post, in which I detail how you lucky so-and-sos might go about winning a beautifully illustrated, super-limited, sold-out first edition of The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang, courtesy the exceedingly good cakes at Subterranean Press.

The right answer to the silly little riddle I came up with was, of course, digients - though a few of you send in certain other solutions, no less correct in their way, and you know what? Come one, come all, I say!

So. A prolonged roll on the drums...

...a click of this random generator thingummy and...

...we have our winner!

Huge congratulations to Blair Anderson from the great Sooner State of Oklahoma. I'll have an email your way to get your address and explain the rest in a minute, Blair.

But fret not, all those of you who entered and aren't in fact Mr. Anderson - and what a turnout there was! - because the booby prize you're all getting is pretty cool in its own right. In fact, it's also The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang, which just so happens to be available online in its entirety. Read it for free right here, as part of the Fall 2010 issue of Subterranean Magazine.

I'd heartily recommend you do just that, too. But if you're still unsure, by all means, peruse the full review. I'll say again: Ted Chiang really is all that.

Giving The Game Away | Win a First Edition of The Lifecycle of Software Objects!

Perhaps you were intrigued by this afternoon's review of The Lifecycle of Software Objects. Perhaps the fact that "it is heartbreaking. It is profound. It is tremendously powerful, a tour de force, and so very, very sweet" has bumped the latest Ted Chiang up a few notches on your tower of books To Be Read.

I should think so, too. :)

But wait, what's that? You don't already own it? Amazon's sold out of the second printing now, too? Well, lucky for you, I just so happen to have a spare copy of this gorgeous Subterranean Press edition of The Lifecycle of Software Objects going, and all you have to do to stand a chance of winning it is riddle me this. Seriously:

We are men but not men.

Intelligent artifice all

Left behind but beloved.

What are we called?

The answer to which riddle you'll find in my review of Ted Chiang's latest modest masterpiece. It's really very easy when you know how.

So, send your guess along to "thespeculativescotsman [at] googlemail [dot] com" with subject headers marked "SubPress Giveaway" and I'll let you know who the very lucky winner of this immaculate - and already rather rare - first edition is on... shall we say Friday?

I expect we shall. Go on, now!

###

Updated as of 19:07 to say, since a few of you have asked: no matter where in the world you are, rest easy. You can enter this competition from the States, Germany, the UK - wherever, I mean it.


Also it's been lovely to hear from readers in all the countries there've been entries from already. Keep 'em coming! :)

Book Review | The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
or direct from a lovely publisher

What's the best way to create artificial intelligence? In 1950, Alan Turing wrote, 'Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. Again I do not know what the right answer is, but I think both approaches should be tried.'

The first approach has been tried many times in both science fiction and reality. In this new novella, at over 30,000 words, his longest work to date, Ted Chiang offers a detailed imagining of how the second approach might work within the contemporary landscape of startup companies, massively-multiplayer online gaming, and open-source software. It's a story of two people and the artificial intelligences they helped create, following them for more than a decade as they deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are inevitable in the world of software. At the same time, it's an examination of the difference between processing power and intelligence, and of what it means to have a real relationship with an artificial entity.

***

Ted Chiang has made quite the name for himself by doing a great deal with very little. More than 20 years he's been a part of the speculative scene, such as it is - such as it ever was - yet in that time he's never published a novel; only twelve of the short stories he's composed have seen the light of day; and just the one novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, which nevertheless took home both the Hugo and the Nebula for its category in 2008. That's in addition to a treasure trove of other equally prestigious awards, lavished upon the author's previous work.

A bone fide novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects is the longest thing Ted Chiang  has ever put out there. Published as an exquisite trade edition by the Subterranean Press elves last Summer, it comes as little surprise that - as a physical thing as well as a deeply touching tale of companionship, sacrifice, and obligation, and so many other subjects the mind practically boggles - on both counts The Lifecycle of Software Objects is truly a beautiful book.

We've gotten pretty blasé about artificial intelligence in recent years, haven't we? Certainly the misappropriation of the term by programmers in the video game industry and elsewhere to describe what are at heart smarter sub-routines hasn't helped, but I would argue there's more to our nonchalance than that. Perhaps one too many cautionary tales has been the final nail in the coffin of that avenue of imagination; it seems Asimov's rules only exist to be broken, after all. Or perhaps we merely fear the competition, and the notion of another intelligence, our equal or our better, is too grave a threat to our egos for us to simply square away.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects is in no small part so refreshing because it offers a more optimistic perspective on where the artificial intelligence software solutions of today might likely lead. Chiang introduces us to once and former zookeeper Ana, and Derek, an animator, both of whom come to work for Blue Gamma, a start-up with designs on the market for artificial pets. Blue Gamma's business is digients: postmodern Tamagotchis of a sort. Says the headhunter who hires Ana on, "We're going to pitch them as pets you can talk to, teach to do really cool tricks. There's an unofficial slogan we use in-house: 'All the fun of monkeys, with none of the poop-throwing.'" (p.4) Hence the need for an animal trainer like Ana. She is to rear the digients as she would a shrewdness of baby apes. Derek, meanwhile, designs their expressions, and so their personalities in part.

Too soon Blue Gamma let loose the digients on the world without, and to begin with, people embrace their Marcos and their Polos. Hundreds of thousands of Lolly models and Rex derivatives are adopted by adoring owners, and Blue Gamma's fortunes seem on the rise. However, unto every rise, a fall, and indeed the start-up comes a-cropper of the rocky road before it, for the digients are only loving pseudo-pets when their pseudo-parents treat them with care, and respect. Like Tamagotchis in their time, the zeitgeist shortly moves on to the next thing, and the next next thing, leaving their digients behind as they go, in suspension or worse.

Ana and Derek each opt to keep the digients they have become so attached to, and in The Lifecycle of Software Objects Chiang poignantly chronicles the development of these forgotten AIs, as well as the people who come to care for them so - though to a lesser extent. Chiang's focus herein is primarily on the digients; thus, some readers might find themselves turned off by a perceived lack of sympathetic characters. 

But rubbish on that excuse. Marco and Polo and Rex are fleshed out fabulously over the course of the decade during which Chiang follows the three: The Lifecycle of Software Objects is their journey, and their story, and I am frankly baffled that so many critics have taken issue with the seeming superfluousness of Ana and Derek as if they, and not the digients, were Chiang's protagonists. A nonsense. That this outcast couple are but a secondary concern is exactly as it should be. The Lifecycle of Software Objects is superb, and made so by the breathtakingly intimate tale of what amounts to a few forgotten toys, striving to thrive, or just to survive, in a world which has long since moved on.

If Chiang's latest is not quite his greatest, it speaks only to the tremendous strength of his all-too occasional work, and to the larger question this lovingly honed narrative leaves hanging: what next? For though there is closure of a sort, come the quiet climax, and a resonance of emotion in its wake, still one wishes The Lifecycle of Software Objects would go on a little longer. Or perhaps a lot longer; certainly there is potential aplenty to.

You know, I feel greedy just saying that. I'll take whatever Ted Chiang I can get, in truth - that there is as much to his latest as there is is a treat. However much I might like another. And another.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects is a desperately sad story in the main, yet uplifting for all that, such that I spent the last chapters with a leaden lump in my throat which hadn't a clue what it was about. For its part, The Lifecycle of Software Objects is about love, and loss; friendship, and responsibility; nature - and nurture - and artifice. It is heartbreaking. It is profound. It is tremendously powerful, a tour de force, and so very, very sweet.

Why, it's Ted Chiang!

***

The Lifecycle of Software Objects
by Ted Chiang

US Publication: July 2010, Subterranean Press


Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
or direct from a lovely publisher


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