My Y2K with SAP R/3: "A Life in Code - A Personal History of Technology" By Ellen Ullman

If you want to get a glimpse of what was the Y2K Bug craze in 1999 Ullman’s chapter on it is a must.

Millenniums may ask: “What was the Y2K bug?” Well, as one who was actively working in IT at the time, it basically was the number of seriously heavyweight IT-reliant- and IT-provider-based organizations running crapped out, moth-eaten, disaster-ready systems for critical public service and infrastructure functions, systems that were originally developed for Noah's GPSing around Ararat, beggars belief. The problem with the earlier Y2K and other system's potential 1970s-based clock issue and its siblings was and is their potential for cascading. The Y2K bug did, indeed, bite a lot of systems, but it did not go critical and ignite a runaway reaction. However, before the event absolutely no-one on the planet knew for sure whether it would or not.

The real problem was in the corporate/government sphere where old systems running in-house code needed to be fixed and/or replaced, although those systems could be running on quite small hardware platforms, and the risks were real that something serious might happen, and people needed to be informed so that they could carry out the necessary checks (even if that meant doing nothing). It's very true that the vast majority of consumer (and small business) hardware/software applications were sorted by the natural replacement cycle and by the fact that widespread adoption of computers at that scale was comparatively recent (by which I mean the late eighties and nineties). The challenge, as anyone who has done any serious integration testing on enterprise scale applications knows, is testing all the different scenarios; the risk of a cascading failure is ever present.

Simulating 'what-if' scenarios against a future time was particularly hard, since we had to advance the system clocks of many applications simultaneously (or simulate the impact of that). Where finance postings were involved (as is typically the case with billing and logistics systems) that becomes exceptionally difficult to plan and organise. In nearly 20 years of working in one the largest organisations in Portugal, I had never seen such testing done on such a wide scale. At the time, I certainly didn't condone 'mass scaremongering' and I was not gleeful that the world mostly acted professionally to fix the Y2K problem. I'm happy that the risks were assessed and a conservative precautionary principle was followed. If we couldn't realistically have tested all the possible failure modes of a future time flipping things into an unstable state it was safer to find and fix as many of the bugs as possible well in advance. I think it's sad that unscrupulous businesses used it as an opportunity to pressurise people to upgrade and replace things that might safely have been left alone, rather than educating them to do more research and maybe decide for themselves that they were, in fact, ok. The sad fact is that for many people IT fulfills Arthur C. Clarke's maxim: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguisable from magic", and they will always be prone to being conned.

Will we have another Y2K-craze in 2038? I doubt I will last until 2038 (or the advent of its analogous problem in other systems, probably around the same time) but, if I do, I really hope this time sees a cascading reaction; it will indeed be a pleasure to go out, to adapt Bob Monkhouse's anecdote, listening peacefully to the screams of a multitude of hitherto complacent and ill-informed dweebs as their teetering systems crash and burn around them. I'll rouse myself briefly and LOL: "Ha ha," I'll go. "Ha ha ha." I'll probably be dead when all the planes fall out of the sky this time, so no worries…

How can we motivate corporate businesses to address the 2038 issue? Simple. With threats. Ultimately it is all fixable; I wouldn't panic right now, though it is time to start worrying about it. And anyone coding time into 32 bit numbers right now deserves to be forced to use Windows 3.1 for a month until they promise never to do it again…

NB: A personal note. The Germans calmly assessed the situation and ported non Y2K compliant IBM COBOL code into Y2K compliant SAP ABAP code, and launched one of the largest software companies on Earth. Implementing SAP R/3 to replace old IBM ERP solutions was one of the main ways that companies world-wide avoided the Y2K problem. I was head of an IT SAP Systems Administration team at the time, and the only think I had to worry about was to make sure all the programs developed by humans were Y2K-Compliant, and that was still a big worry I can tell you. My team spent New Year’s Eve at the office to make sure everything went according to plan while other teams were in the trenches... I remember my team drinking and eating on New Year's Eve...Wondrous times that won't come back.

Beyond the Usual Alpha-Beta Search: "Deep Thinking - Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins” by Garry Kasparov, Mig Greengard

“In 2016, nineteen years after my loss to Deep Blue, the Google-backed AI project DeepMind and its Go-playing offshoot AlphaGo defeated the world’s top Go player, Lee Sedol. More importantly, as also as predicted, the methods used to create AlphaGo were more interesting as an IA Project than anything that had produced the top chess machines. It uses machine learning and neural networks to teach itself how to play better, as well as other sophisticated techniques beyond the usual alpha-beta search. Deep Blue was the end; AlphaGo is a beginning.”

In “Deep Thinking - Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins” by Garry Kasparov, Mig Greengard 

My personal experience with Go dates back at least a decade. I remember getting slaughtered every time by the free GNUgo software, just as I had been by every human opponent for the last 20 years. Never got the hang of it, though I was school chess captain back in the day. Totally different mindset. I first came across it in a little-remembered crime series called 'The Man in Room 17', with Richard Vernon and Denholm Ellit eponymously solving crimes without leaving their office, where they were always playing go. I also remember a funny little story while I was attending the British Council. Back in the 80s, a Korean guy gave me a game. After every move I played, he stifled a laugh and started a rapid fire of, "No! Cos you purrin ['put in', I presume] there, then I purrin here, after you purrin there an' I purrin here, you lose these piece" None of which made anything clearer. At chess, the first (okay, tenth) time I got mated on the back row by a rook, I learned not to leave the king behind a wall of pawns. Never got my head round the simplest 'joseki' (corner opening) at Go. Beautifully elegant game though.

When reading about the game in Kasparov’s book, I just got sidetracked. Back in the day, along with Chess, I tried to develop a Go AI engine. Sad to say, I could never build it to my full satisfaction; I was able to beat it 9 out of 10 times.  Not so with chess. My AI Chess developed in C, if I may say so, was quite good. Does AlphaGo's success tell us something about the mindfulness of its technology, or does it instead tell us something about the mindlessness of games like chess and Go? Back in the day I studied AphaGo's performance, and impressed though I was by its playing strength, I did notice that it seemed to not understand two basic concepts of Go called "sente" (seizing the initiative) and "aji" (leaving a rock in the road for the opponent to trip over later), as was evidenced by opportunities it missed. What is quite remarkable is that AlphaGo doesn't understand a single thing about Go, except how to count the final score! AlphaGo circumvents the problem of understanding the toy world of Go by using two mathematical tricks: (1) learning knee-jerk reactions and (2) statistically sensible guesswork. A knee-jerk reaction is an automatic reaction to an event that seems to match a pattern; we rely upon such reactions to avoid dangers such as the edge of a cliff or a fire. Such reactions are essential for survival, but they are also unreliable because what we think we see is not always what is there. A pretty face does not necessarily imply a pretty mind. Anyone who has used Google's search engine will know that whereas it is superb at finding information, it is also somewhat clueless as it pulls up a wastepaper basketful of irrelevant snow as well as the one or two nuggets you were looking for. Because Google doesn't speak English. It knows nothing about the world we live in so relies instead solely upon statistical pattern matching to find its answers, much the same as IBM's Jeopardy champ "Watson" does. Jeopardy and document search are tasks well-suited to mindless association-seeking. AlphaGo is of the same breed as Google search and Watson; there are nuances of difference in their pattern-matching algorithms, but the underlying principle is the same: they all search for matching patterns, without troubling to understand what the patterns mean in terms of an ontology of cause and effect. In AlphaGo's case, the patterns it looks for are ones it has inferred by using an artificial intelligence technology called an "(artificial) neural network" that has had some success in learning to recognise a specific object in photographs - most famously, whether there is a cat in a YouTube video.

A Go game in progress is nothing more complicated than a very simple digital photograph, made of just 19x19 pixels, each of which can have just one of three colours: black, white, or empty. So people thought that what works for seeing cats in videos might also work for seeing good moves in Go.

And it does.

In convolutions of artificial neurons, information flows both ways through a stratified network. They are capable of learning patterns more complex than simple one-way networks - although perhaps it would be better to say that they can learn probable patterns, since the mathematics they use creates a probability spectrum of possible identifications. And that is just what's needed to play Go against people, for not even a Go grand-master can say unequivocally what is the best move in the middle of a game. AlphaGo's neural network was trained by showing it what good players did in over 30 million positions taken from a database of expert-level games. It produces a spectrum of knee-jerk reaction good move possibilities, but it doesn't stop there. It goes on to imagine what might happen in the future. AlphaGo's future-guessing methods are different from those used by Deep Blue to defeat chess champ Gary Kasparov, but both their methods are essentially brute-force techniques, relying on sampling millions of possible sequences rather than examining a few pertinent lines by goal-directed knowledge-based search.

AlphaGo can do one thing that Deep Blue could not: it can learn. Right now, it is learning to improve its stockpile of patterns by playing itself every day and teaching itself which moves worked out well during those experiments. However, the rate of improvement of a convolutional neural network reduces over time, so there is every reason to doubt that AlphaGo will become strong enough to beat Lee Sedol.

Nevertheless, both Deep Blue and AlphaGo have reached a game-playing ability higher than 99% of those of us who have also tried to play chess or Go, so we humans should perhaps hang our heads in shame at being so incompetent at reasoning that an unreasoning machine can better us at games we thought to be intellectual challenges requiring sophisticated strategy and tactics! However, although computers can now beat us at board games as well as see a cat in a video, we need not fear that they are about to take over the world and turn us into their domesticated animals. The 0.1% have already won that game.

NB: I closely followed the match between Deep Blue and Kasparov at the time. The 6^th (last) game was especially unfathomable. I remember thinking how could Kasparov play into a well-known opening trap in the Caro-Kann. WTF? When a world champion plays like a beginner, there is not much to be said, and much to be sad about. It wasn’t that Deep Blue “outmaneuvered” Kasparov, it was that Kasparov defeated himself. My disenchantment with chess started with this specific game. This match was a travesty and I never recovered from it.

European Union: "Artificial Inteligence" by Noah Berlastsky

(Original Review, 2014-10-31)

Dear Barroso, Dear Malstrom and other commissioners,

If you want to achieve economic growth in Europe, you should stop bribing politicians as the Governments of Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czech, Hungary ...and the Central Bankers. We all know you thought-control them on the nets of Telecom Austria, Telenor ... with implants ...to quote European Parliament "converging technologies, shaping the future of european societies" - "there will be politicians with implants and control in this manner". We all know Commissioners, ECB, EC, EBRD employees have such implants and act together. We know you offer a "better life" to the CEE servants if the betray their countries, a little bit. We all know how you manipulate Ukraine and media.

There is a doubling in M1 for 5-6 year in the EUROZONE, which led to high Stock Prices only without significant growth. There is declining inflation, and according to the quantitative theory of money prices should nearly follow the quantity of money in the long run. The USA economy is growing, the EU not. So if prices do not increase, the competitiveness is not good and there will not be profits for the companies so the Stock Exchange Index may be a bubble. I am not sure how much you earn from stealing from CEE, but it is not enough for growth. I am also not aware how thought control influence the economic growth theories, but I suppose as Greenspan says if there is leverage and bubble the crisis may be substantial due to animal spirit. So we do not need bluff for economic growth but fair game from now onward to some extent.

Now, as you Barroso sent people to bribe me, implanted me with a device for though-control involuntary and threatened me to earn 50 BLN from the crisis you organized in Bulgaria, I will dare to give some advices. Do not sent Draghi to ask why people do not believe the european institutions and there is only 30% support. Why 50% believe there will not be EU which is suspiciously stable figure in the eurobarometer? Do not organize cartels on the domestic companies in EU, do not use though-control above law and industry and do not control communications of the aforementioned countries Central Banks and Banking System. Do not organize speculative crises hiding behind Sorors or other speculators. Do not steal resources from these countries. Is the expression "the information is the new oil" origination from EU? Establish fact in economics is that the stability and law lead to economic growth. You can't take 3 BLN EUR from Bulgaria, 1.5 BLN EUR with Austria Banks cartel in Bulgaria and thought-control on the net of Telecom Austria.

What is the last and only value of EU - the profit. Even Marx says, that if you still want the same return on capital, which concentrates in 10% of the people, there will be a revolution because employees do not receive enough output. If there is not technological progress, there is not going to be more output and we can expect revolution in one or another form. Think for sharing knowledge with CEE such as thought-control technologies. You are not a businessman, do not strive for short term profits. Do you risk trillions of EUR if bribing, thought-control and cheating of companies as Siemens, Telecom Austria (a nice experiment example), SAP, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Apple is revealed to act together with EU authorities to control the EU (I have proofs for some of them only). Do not steal from small countries with companies and cheap PR for some EU funds (some of them stolen from EU). Do not make fun of us, or every European Citizen sooner or latter [2018 EDIT: sic] will know what are you doing and will interpret the information correctly. In particular, do not extinct the Bulgarian nation for the simple reason of economic profits.

We can't shake hands with you, because you do not know if I will hold a check for 1,500 EUR and you for 1 million EUR as it seems to be the established practice in EU. The odds of this game are trillions to 1, think what chance I have and decide if you want to play "music-lover ". Tell Malstrom not to kill people as in Perm, or Burgas as ultimatum or probably the Mall in Latvia, or Smolenks for which I receive info in advance because Stalin and USSR was another union. Strive for knowledge, values with higher return not bribing. Information nowadays is everywhere and EU citizens have about 100BLN EUR, not neurons in neural networks to interpret the information correctly.

[2018 EDIT: Eduardo Barroso is a Portuguese Politician who for 10 years lead the EU.]