Chasm Waxing: A Startup, Cyber-Thriller (16 page)

“
Now, what you’d like to
see is as little
variance
as possible.
Ideally,
you wouldn’t see any green or
red
differences
.
Everything
would be a black, ‘zero.’ If there
were
no
variances, you’d be a god. All your predictions would be coming
exactly true. Now, come down here.”

They moved to the
meta-column dated with today’s date, July 31, 2020.
After that,
the
meta-column only recorded predicted values. “My
backtest
shows that the deep
learning algorithm would have been very
useful
in predicting closing
prices for the next day, especially as time advanced.”

Becca looked to her
left. She
noticed that while there were more red and green variances in
January; each month,
more
black
zeros were visible. July
contained the most black
zeroes. “This month was the best month so far.
Even where there are red or
green
numbers,
the variances are
decreasing.”

“
That’s precisely right.
The algorithm is learning. It’s getting better and better at
predicting the closing
prices
. My dad would kill for this
software.”

“
I guess I should invest
in
Facebook
stock,” said Becca.

“
Yes. Not only could you
invest in the stock,
but you
could
make a fortune in
options. The algorithm gives you
a high degree of confidence in tomorrow’s closing
price.”

“
So, you are going to quit
your job as CEO and trade on Wall Street?” asked Becca—half
serious.

“
No, my dad has done that
forever. I admire him. He’s a
billionaire. That’s awesome.
But I want
to change the world.
This
is
exactly
what I want my algorithms to enable—discovery. I don’t want
to watch closing prices and charts for a living. I
want to
create
ever more
valuable
closing prices for my publicly traded AI
corporation.

“
I want my
company
to
predict your future interests. It could be something like a movie,
a pair of shoes, your future husband—anything. Your discovery
service will run in the background and be an extension of you—your
extended intelligence.

“
It could do your chores.
It could execute
smart
contracts for you on the Blockchain. It could
purchase your
groceries,
because it talks to your refrigerator and knows
you’re low on eggs. The possibilities are endless. But the bottom
line is that you would do a lot less searching and a lot more
discovering. The more the AI knows about you, the better
predictions your discovery service would render. Advertisers would
love it. Some would even just target ads to the discovery
service.”

“
I don’t understand how
it’s predicting the future with such a high degree of accuracy?”
asked Becca. “It only has information that is available to us. I
mean, you didn’t program it to figure out tomorrow’s closing price
of Facebook.”

“
That’s just it, Becca. I
don’t know how it’s doing it either. I didn’t program an algorithm
to bet on football or determine closing prices. I just used a deep
learning algorithm to create a neural network. That neural network
was designed to understand and learn from English text. I can’t
predict what the AI is going to learn. Deep learning offers a new
way to program computers. My only job is to make the deep learning
algorithms understand
text
better.”

“
How do you do that?”
asked Becca.

“
I tell the algorithm it’s
doing a good job or bad job with supervised learning. Then, I’ll
turn it
loose
and see what it learns without my feedback. That’s called
unsupervised learning. Also, I
want
to improve each layer of the
neural network that processes the text…characters,
prefixes, suffixes,
grammatical
relationships, word
vectors, sentences—all the way to semantics, ontologies, concepts,
and themes.

“
There are some other
things I want to tweak. I want to make it multi-modal. Then the AI
could learn from text and pictures, for example. I also want to see
how much the neural network creation improves with faster
computers. I’m sure General Shields is going to love
this,
and he’ll
get me
some time
on the NSA supercomputers.”

“
I know he’ll love it,”
said Becca. “Now let me try. TextWorld, display something I don’t
know.”

Josh looked chagrined. “Becca, that’s
not going to—”

Before Josh could finish
his statement, they were immersed in
a number of
words and images. These
included: Area 51, Aliens, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, Hillary
Clinton pictured with the King of Saudi Arabia, and an old Harrison
Ford
picture
. It
was snapped
from the set of the film,
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. Becca
selected the
image
of Indiana Jones. “My dad and I loved
that movie
.” She
expected to
see
little-known
movie
trivia,
or obscure facts
about Harrison Ford.

A word cloud did appear.
And there were topics that Becca expected. “Look at everything I
don’t know,” huffed Becca. “And you were just about to tell me that
my question wouldn’t work. I can’t
believe
you’d do that on Valentine’s
Day.”

Josh laughed.

Upon closer examination,
Becca saw a topic she didn’t anticipate—an
unknown unknown
. She reached out
and picked the ‘Location of the Ark of the Covenant’
topic.

The Past/ Present/ Future Grid
appeared.

The Ark had fascinated
Becca since she watched the movie. “Dad told me that this was not
just a movie mystery.
This
is
a real historical enigma. No one knows
what
actually
happened
to the Ark. It
disappeared.”

“
Yeah, it was lost from
history in 587 BC,” said Josh, reading from the Present column.
Both of their eyes immediately gravitated to the Future column. On
the far right side of the Future
column stood a
glistening white and
gold building.

The building reminded
Becca of the Acropolis, but it was more
rectangular
and tall. Two
colossal
pillars, probably three or four stories high, guarded the
entrance to the building. There was a
large
stone structure in front of
the building, surrounded by
a
number of
courtyards.

Closer to Becca than that
structure, but still in the Future column, was an A-Map of the
Middle East. The
map
was labeled
in a
typical manner. It had roads, highways, the Jordan and Nile Rivers,
and nation-state names. The
designated
countries included portions
of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the northern part of Saudi Arabia.
The entirety of Israel and Egypt
was also portrayed
.

The two ambled closer to
the A-Map. “
Woah
,” said Becca, “is this showing us
the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant?”

“
I don’t know,” replied
Josh. “It’s a big area. Maybe, as I improve the algorithm and run
it on faster computers, it’ll get more
detailed
. It’s
interesting,
though. And,
a
t least
you know your Cowboys are going to have a good year. Let’s
get out of the Middle East. I don’t want to get run over by a
camel.”

Becca laughed. “Alright, I’m
hungry.”

*

Josh drove Becca to
Georgetown for dinner. Georgetown was a historic neighborhood of
Washington, DC. It was an
extremely
pleasant drive in Josh’s
white, Faraday 777 GTS
Convertible
. Josh’s dad had bought him
the car before he quit MIT. Faraday Motors was an upstart car
company, based in the UK. They specialized in luxury, electric
sports cars.

Josh thought it was cool
that Flashcharge, another member of the Accelerator, was piloting
their microwave power charging technology with Faraday. The trip
was normally about 45 minutes, but Josh had a lead foot.
All the Faraday’s cool apps enthralled
Becca. The Faraday was
truly a software
defined car.

Becca asked Josh if he’d like to get
on the speakerphone with her dad. They could ask him about the Ark
of the Covenant. Josh agreed.

She introduced Josh as, ‘her friend.’
“Dad, what can you tell us about the Ark of the
Covenant?”

“
What?” asked Elisha.
“It’s 8:45 on a Friday night, and you want to talk about the Bible?
Have you guys been drinking?”

“
No, not for at least
another 20 minutes,” chuckled Becca. “Seriously Dad, Josh was
showing me something related to a project he’s working on. And the
Ark of the Covenant came up. Neither one of us knows too much about
it. I know you do.”

“
Alright,” said Elisha.
“The Ark
is first mentioned
in Exodus, the second book of the Hebrew Bible
after Genesis. Just about a year after the Exodus—you know, the
parting of the Red Sea and all; God told Moses to build a
gold-plated
,
rectangular box, made of acacia wood. He commanded the exact
dimensions, something like four and
one-half feet
long, by two and
one-half feet
high, by two and
one-half
feet
wide
.

“
The lid of the Ark was
also to be covered with pure gold. Additionally, this lid was to
include two large golden statues of cherubim angels, hammered from
pure gold. God called this golden
top
of
the Ark, the Mercy Seat. The Bible says that God’s
presence—His glory—would dwell on the Mercy Seat, between the
cherubim. God told
Moses
to place the Ten Commandments into the
Ark.

“
On the outside of the
Ark, in the four corners, were placed four hooks. Through these
hooks, two long poles could be inserted.
Selected
individuals from the
tribe of Levi carried the Ark by holding the poles. You never
wanted to touch the Ark directly.

“
The Ark was to travel
with the Hebrews. It signified that God was present with His
people. God also directed Moses to build the
Tabernacle and to put the Ark in its most prominent
room—the
Holy of Holies. For its day, the
Tabernacle was a sophisticated tent. It could be torn down and set
up quickly, as the Israelites traveled in the desert. 500 years
later Solomon built the first Temple. Solomon was King David’s
favored son. God said He didn’t want to dwell in
a movable
tent
anymore
. He wanted a permanent
house.”

“
That must have been the
temple we saw in TextWorld?” asked Josh.

“
But it was in the Future
column?” said Becca.

“
What?” asked
Elisha.

“
Never mind Dad.
Keep going.”

“
Just like in the
Tabernacle, the Ark
was
housed
the
holiest
place in the Temple, behind a
curtain.”

“
What do people think
happened to the Ark?” asked Becca.

“
Of course, no human alive
knows for sure. The Ark disappeared from the Bible after
Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Solomon’s Temple in 587 BC. Many people
say Nebuchadnezzar
demolished
it in the siege. Other
people think that
he took it
to
Babylon—present day Iraq. Persia
conquered Babylon. Persia is present day Iran. So, some people say
it’s there.

“
Others think that brave
Israelites, like Jeremiah, went in
before
the destruction of the Temple
and hid the Ark. Maybe he buried it in a desert cave or underneath
the Temple. There’s also a very persistent story about the Ark
being in Ethiopia.

“
Since the science
of
archeology
started in the late 1800’s,
archeologists
have searched for
the
Ark.
If you think the greatest artifacts ever discovered were the
Rosetta Stone, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Pompeii, or
Tutankhamun;
unearthing
the Ark is far bigger than all of those combined.
But the
most significant
ramifications would be geopolitical.”