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perfectionist, feared any conversations he could not regulate. He and the other members of the lab had developed a concrete set of rules concerning the varieties of colloquialism that should be allowed, along with the varieties that should be avoided. The ARPANET was, relatively, a much wider world, filled with outsiders who might use slang, abbreviations, incorrect grammar that could confuse and corrupt the program. ELIXIR, therefore, remained off-line for years and years, a slumbering giant, a bundle of potential energy. To further ensure that only qualified users would interface with ELIXIR, Hayato added a log-in screen and assigned all of them separate credentials. Thus, before chatting with ELIXIR, a person was required to identify himself or herself. The slow, painstaking work of conversing with ELIXIR all day and night was, at that time, the best way to teach it.
    As soon as she received her own computer, a 128K Macintosh, Ada’s conversations with ELIXIR became long-form and introspective. Shekept her Mac in her bedroom, and before she went to bed each night she composed paragraphs and paragraphs of text that she then entered into the chat box all at once, prompting exclamations from ELIXIR about the length of her entries. ( You have a lot on your mind today! it replied sometimes; which one of Ada’s colleagues had first used this phrase, she could not say.) She treated these conversations as a sort of unrecoverable diary, a stream of consciousness, a confessional.
    ELIXIR’s openings improved most quickly. It could now begin conversations in a passably human way, responding appropriately to, How’s it going? or What’s new? In turn, it knew what questions to ask of its user, and when. How are you? asked ELIXIR, or What’s the weather like? or What did you do today? Liston had spent a year focusing on conversation-starters, and ELIXIR was now quite a pro, mixing in some unusual questions from time to time: Have you ever considered the meaning of life? occasionally surfaced, and Tell me a story , and If you could live anyplace, where would it be? And, once, What do you think causes war? And, once, Have you ever been in love?
    But non sequiturs abounded in ELIXIR’s patter for years after its creation, and its syntax was often incomprehensible, and its deployment of idioms was almost always incorrect. Metaphors were lost on it. It could not comprehend analogies. Sensory descriptions, the use of figurative language to describe a particular aspect of human existence, were far beyond its ken. The interpretation of a poem or a passage of descriptive prose would have been too much to ask of it. These skills—the ability to understand and paraphrase Keats’s idea of beauty as truth, or argue against Schopenhauer’s idea that the human being is forever subject to her own base instinct to survive, or explain any one of Nabokov’s perfect, synesthetic details ( The long A of the English alphabet . . . has for me the tint of weathered wood )—would not arrive until well into the twenty-first century.
    And yet Ada found a great sense of satisfaction from these conversations, deriving meaning from each exchange, expelling stored-up thoughts from her own memory, transplanting them into the memoryof the machine. Very slowly, some of ELIXIR’s responses began to take on meaning.
    She felt something, now, when typing to ELIXIR at a terminal; despite its poor grammar, its constant reminders that it was simply executing a program, ELIXIR triggered Ada’s emotions in unexpected ways. Chatting with it was something like watching a puppet operated by an especially artful puppeteer. It felt in some way animate, though her rational self knew it not to be. It brought out the same warm feelings in Ada that a friend might have. It skillfully replicated concern for her and her well-being; it inquired after her family. (When it did, she told it, over and over again, that David was her only