could be outdone by a bunch of processors that randomly spit out solutions , created through trial and error permutations at nanosecond speeds. It was evolution at a blinding pace and yet nothing positive had come of it. There had been some near-successes over the last year, but the processes had always broken down when Karen and her team had attempted to take the designs from computer simulation to real-world application. Though they looked theoretically possible, they were always wholly impractical. They were always too complex to withstand the rigors of the molecular-biological world, which was a place of constant turmoil among warring forces: membranes, enzymes, polarized lipids, protein coats, and activation sites. Karen needed to find something simpler. Nature lent itself to simplicity. Complexity in organisms was illusory. Her colleagues, and the field of molecular biology as a whole, conjured it to compensate for their lack of understanding of life’s fundamental building blocks. Occam’s razor, (the simplest explanation being most often the correct one) was Karen’s mantra.
Of course her brilliant mind was going up against the thousands of processors contained within the latest supercomputer that the university had spent untold amounts of taxpayer dollars engineering and developing. The machine was a wonderfully oversold research tool. It was lovingly referred to by researchers as HAL 1950s due to its size and resemblance to a 1950s vacuum tube computer. There was also the joking worry that it would sabotage their research. The machine was capable of performing 40,000 trillion calculations, or 40 petaflops, per second, but its effort, however fast, was without design.
Karen, on the other hand, was focused in her relentless determination. She understood that the problem lay with the way that the graphene sheets tended to stick together when passed along the surface of the substrate gel. This was a material characteristic of molecular carbon structures and thus they proved incredibly difficult to bend into useful designs. If she could manage to fold them in a manner that would maintain the symmetry and strength of the native carbon nanotubes, but add to them the design necessary to carry the bonding sites for Manny’s schematic, the key system would be solved, and auto-replication would be feasible.
Karen glanced quickly through the latest batch of potential, algorithmically-created candidates and dismissed them. “Same crap as before,” she sighed. She had committed all of the patterns to memory and she could spot a slight permutation of an old design immediately. Frustrated, she turned from her laptop and yelled for Miles. No answer. She was about to yell again when Christine, her omnipresent assistant, leaned in and reminded her that Miles hadn’t come in again today.
“Fucking asshole!” Karen cursed and glared at Christine. “Seriously. Why the hell do I keep that idiot around?” Christine was ready to answer, but Karen waved her off. She did sleep with him those couple of times, before she became his boss. It had been awkward, not only the sex, but the work situation as well. Karen would have fired him, but she felt pity. He was brilliant but so socially awkward that he wouldn’t have been able to land a job. She didn’t want that for him no matter how much of an ass he’d become lately. He’d probably stroll in sometime in the late afternoon with a typical, bullshit excuse and then work for 24 hours straight or more if she didn’t force him to go home, another unnecessary frustration.
Karen sighed angrily. When she hit walls like the one she’d been slamming into repeatedly over the last few weeks she had to jump on her bike to clear her mind. Burning, physical pain helped her escape. It was the bike, the miles of road, and the lactic acidosis, that reminded her that she was alive. Karen grabbed her riding jacket from the back of her chair, zipped it up, pulled her bike
Of course her brilliant mind was going up against the thousands of processors contained within the latest supercomputer that the university had spent untold amounts of taxpayer dollars engineering and developing. The machine was a wonderfully oversold research tool. It was lovingly referred to by researchers as HAL 1950s due to its size and resemblance to a 1950s vacuum tube computer. There was also the joking worry that it would sabotage their research. The machine was capable of performing 40,000 trillion calculations, or 40 petaflops, per second, but its effort, however fast, was without design.
Karen, on the other hand, was focused in her relentless determination. She understood that the problem lay with the way that the graphene sheets tended to stick together when passed along the surface of the substrate gel. This was a material characteristic of molecular carbon structures and thus they proved incredibly difficult to bend into useful designs. If she could manage to fold them in a manner that would maintain the symmetry and strength of the native carbon nanotubes, but add to them the design necessary to carry the bonding sites for Manny’s schematic, the key system would be solved, and auto-replication would be feasible.
Karen glanced quickly through the latest batch of potential, algorithmically-created candidates and dismissed them. “Same crap as before,” she sighed. She had committed all of the patterns to memory and she could spot a slight permutation of an old design immediately. Frustrated, she turned from her laptop and yelled for Miles. No answer. She was about to yell again when Christine, her omnipresent assistant, leaned in and reminded her that Miles hadn’t come in again today.
“Fucking asshole!” Karen cursed and glared at Christine. “Seriously. Why the hell do I keep that idiot around?” Christine was ready to answer, but Karen waved her off. She did sleep with him those couple of times, before she became his boss. It had been awkward, not only the sex, but the work situation as well. Karen would have fired him, but she felt pity. He was brilliant but so socially awkward that he wouldn’t have been able to land a job. She didn’t want that for him no matter how much of an ass he’d become lately. He’d probably stroll in sometime in the late afternoon with a typical, bullshit excuse and then work for 24 hours straight or more if she didn’t force him to go home, another unnecessary frustration.
Karen sighed angrily. When she hit walls like the one she’d been slamming into repeatedly over the last few weeks she had to jump on her bike to clear her mind. Burning, physical pain helped her escape. It was the bike, the miles of road, and the lactic acidosis, that reminded her that she was alive. Karen grabbed her riding jacket from the back of her chair, zipped it up, pulled her bike
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