Have you played the seaside arcade game where shiny metal balls drops down to ping, ping off little metal pegs and settle in one of a series of channels? After you have fired lots of balls, did you notice a pattern as the silver spheres collect in the channels? A smooth glistening curve of tiny balls forming a dome, a bell curve forms. High scores are harder to get than lower ones. Francis Galton pops up again*, but this time as a fellow Victorian trend setter for future computer design.
Photo credit: Galton Box by Klaus-Dieter Keller at Wikimedia Commons, via the Wikipedia page for the Galton board
Francis Galton invented this special combination of row after row of offset pins and narrow receiving channels to demonstrate a statistical theory called normal distribution: the bell curve. Balls are more likely to bounce their way to the centre, distributing themselves in an elegant sweep down to the left and right edges of the board. But instead of ball bearings, Galton used beans, it was called the bean machine. The point here though is that the machine does a computation – it computes the bell curve.
Skip forward 100 years and ‘Boson Samplers’, based on Galton’s bean machine, are being used to drive forward the next big thing in computer design, quantum computers.
Instead of beans or silver balls computer scientists fire photons, particles of light through minuscule channels on optical chips. These tiny bundles of energy bounce and collide to create a unique pattern, a distribution though one that a normal digital computer would find hard to calculate. By setting it up in different ways, the patterns that result can correspond to different computations. It is computing answers to different calculations set for it.
Through developing these specialised quantum circuits scientists are bouncing beams of light forwards on the path that will hopefully lead to conventional digital technology being replaced with the next generation of supercomputers.
Watch the bell curve appear in real time.
This article was first published on the original CS4FN website and a copy is also on page 17 of issue 20 of the CS4FN magazine, Ada Lovelace: the computer scientist without a computer. You can download a free PDF copy below, along with all of our free material at our downloads site.
*Francis Galton appears earlier in Issue 20, you can read more about him on page 15 of the PDF. Although a brilliant mathematician he held views about people that are unacceptable today. In 2020 University College London (UCL) changed the name of its Galton Lecture Theatre, which had been named previously in his honour, to Lecture Theatre 115.
Computers get faster and faster every year. How come? Because computer scientists and electronic engineers keep thinking up new tricks, completely new ways to make them go faster. One way has been to shrink the components so signals don’t have as far to go. Another is to use the same trick they were using in a beach car park I came across on holiday.
Woolacombe Sands in Devon is one of the most popular beaches around. There is a great expanse of beautiful sand as well as rocks for kids to climb on and good surfing too. The weather is even good there – well most of the time. The car park, right on the edge of the beach fills in the morning. Since most people arrive early and stay all day it’s a standard price of £5.50 for the day. Entry and exit barriers control the numbers. The entry barrier only allows a car to go in if there is a space and another allows people out when they have paid.
That’s where there is a problem though. The vast majority of people leave around 5pm as the ice cream vans pack up and it’s time to look for dinner. The machine only takes coins, and you insert the money from your car at the barrier. Each driver has to fumble with 5 one-pound coins and a 50p and that takes time. Once the current car moves on out there is then another delay as the driver behind pulls forward to get into a position to put their money in. Without some thought it would lead to long queues behind. Not only that it wouldn’t be very green. Cars are at there worst pumping out pollution when in a jam.
The last thing you want to do to a family who’ve had a great day on your beach is then irritate them by clogging them up in a traffic jam when they try to leave. So what do you do? How can you speed things up (and make sure you aren’t just moving the queue to the morning or to some other ticket machine somewhere else)?
The problem is similar to one in designing a computer chip. Think of the cars as data waiting to be processed (perhaps as part of a calculation) and the barrier as a processing unit where some manipulation of that data is needed. Data waiting to be processed has to be fetched before it can be used, just as the cars have to move up to the barrier before the driver can pay. The fact that the problems are so similar suggests that a solution to one may also be a a solution to the other.
Speed it up
There are lots of ways you could change the system to improve the speed of cars being processed in the car park. This speed that data passes through a system is called the ‘throughput’ of the system. Woolacombe have thought of a simple way to improve their throughput. They put a person with a bit of change next to the barrier to help the drivers. This allows them to keep the relatively simple barrier system they have. It also has advantages in keeping the money in one place and being a foolproof way of ensuring there is a space for everyone who enters. It still maintains all the safeguards of the ticket barrier though. How can that one person speed things up?
What would you do?
So what would YOU do if you were that person? Would you speed things up? Or would you just stand there powerless watching the misery of all those families?
The first thing you could do is to stand by the machine and take the change off the driver and insert it yourself. That will speed things up a little bit because it takes longer for drivers to put the money in as they have to stretch out the window of a car. Also if the driver only has a five pound note you can take it and just insert coins from your change bag rather than wasting time passing it back to the driver to then insert. Similarly if the driver only has 50 pence pieces say, rather than wasting time inserting 10 of them you can take them and insert 5 one-pound coins.
You’ve done some good, and removed problems of the slow people inserting coins but you haven’t really solved the bad problems. Cars aren’t moving at all while you are inserting the 6 coins, and after each car moves through the barrier you are doing nothing but waiting for the next car to pull forward. In an ideal system, with the best throughput, the cars barely stop at all and you are constantly busy.
A Pipeline of Cars
It turns out you can do something about that. It’s called pipelining. There is a way you can be busy dealing with the next car even before it’s got to you. You just have to get ahead of yourself!
How? Before the first car arrives, insert 5 pound coins into the machine and wait. As the driver gets to you and gives you the money, insert his or her 50p, keeping the rest. The barrier opens immediately for the driver who barely has to stop. Better still you are now holding 5 pound coins that you can insert as the next car arrives, leaving you back in an identical situation. That means the next car can drive straight through too, and you are constantly busy as long as there are cars arriving.
Speedy data
So you’ve helped the families leaving the beach, but how might a similar trick speed up a computer? Well you can do a similar thing in the way you get a computer processor to execute the instructions from a program. Suppose your program requires the processor to get some numbers from storage, process them (perhaps multiplying the numbers together) and then store the result somewhere else for later use. Typically a program might do that over and over again, varying where the data comes from and how it is processed.
Early computers would do each instruction in turn – doing the fetching, processing and storing of one instruction before starting the next. But that is just like a car in our car park coming to the barrier, being processed and leaving before the next one moves. Can we pull off the same trick to speed things up? Well, yes of course.
All you need to do is overlap the separate parts. Just as at any time in the car park a car will be driving out, a second will be handing over money and a third pulling forward, the same can happen in the computer. As the first instruction’s result is being stored, the next instruction can already be being processed and the data from the one after that can be fetched from memory. Just by reorganising the way the work is done, we have roughly tripled the speed of our computer as now three things are happening at once.
What we have done is set up a ‘pipeline’ – with a series of instructions all flowing through it, being executed, at the same time. Woolacombe has a pipeline of cars, but in a computer we pipeline data. Either way things get done faster and people are happier.
Computer science happens in some unexpected places – even at the beach – but then perhaps that isn’t so surprising given computers are made of sand!
Other beach-themed articles on this blog include how the origins of how Paul learned to program while on holiday (“The beach, the missionary and my origin myth”) and messages hidden (steganography) within the stripes of deckchairs (“Encrypted deckchairs”).
One Saturday afternoon one spring in San Francisco, a queue of people stretched down the pavement from a neighbourhood market. There was no shortage of other food shops nearby, so why were hundreds of people waiting to buy everything from crisps to cat litter at this one place? Because that shop had pledged to donate more than a fifth of that day’s profits to improving its environmental footprint.
Pillow fights and parties
The organisation behind the busy shopping day is called Carrotmob. The tactics they used to summon so many people to the tiny market in San Francisco had already been working all over the world for less serious stuff. From a huge pillow fight in New York’s Times Square to a mass disco at Victoria Station in London where people danced along to their MP3 players, the concept of the flashmob can seem to create a party out of thin air. From a simple idea, word can spread over social networking sites, email and word of mouth until a few people have turned into a huge crowd.
Carrotmob’s founder, Brent Schulkin, wanted to try and entice businesses into going green using a language he thought they’d understand: cash. In return for getting loads of new customers to buy things, the owners had to give back some of their windfall profit to the Earth. To test his idea he went round to food shops in his neighbourhood. He said he could bring lots of extra customers to the shop on a particular day, and asked each of them how much of that day’s profit they’d be willing to spend on making their businesses more environmentally friendly. K&D Market won the bidding war by promising to spend 22% of the profits putting in greener lighting and making their fridges more energy-efficient. Now that K&D had agreed to the deal, Brent had to bring in the punters. He needed a flashmob.
Flashmobs work because it’s now so easy to stay in touch with large numbers of people. If we find out about a cool event we can share it with all our friends just by making one post on sites like Facebook or Twitter. We can make plans to do something as a group just by sending a few texts. When lots of people spread word around like this, suddenly a small idea like Carrotmob, armed with only a website and a few videos, can drop an hour-long queue on the doorstep of a market in San Francisco.
Success!
It’s not easy to enjoy yourself when you’re waiting for an hour to buy a packet of instant noodles, but that’s another advantage of the flashmob: the party atmosphere, the feeling that you’re part of something big. The results were big: the impromptu shoppers brought in more than $9000 – four times what the shop ordinarily rings up on a Saturday afternoon. Lots of the purchases went to a food bank, so even more people shared in the benefits. In the end the shop did well, the Earth did well, and the Carrotmobbers got a party. Plus the good feeling you get from helping the environment probably stays with you longer than the good feeling from getting hit in the face with a pillow.
To become a Jedi Knight you must have complete control of your thoughts. As you feel the force you start to control your surroundings and make objects move just by thinking. Telekinesis is clearly impossible, but could technology give us the same ability? The study of brain-computer interfaces is an active area of research. How can you make a computer sense and react to a person’s brain activity in a useful way?
Imagine the game of Mindball. Two competitors face each other across a coffee table. A ball sits at the centre. The challenge is to push the ball to your opponent’s end before they push it down to you. The twist is you can use the power of thought alone.
Sound like science fiction? It’s not! I played it at the Dundee Sensation Science Centre many, many years ago where it was a practical and fun demonstration of the then nascent area of brain-computer interfaces.
Each player wears a headband containing electrodes that pick up your brain waves – specifically alpha and theta waves. They are shown as lines on a monitor for all to see. The more relaxed you are, the more you can shut down your brain, the more your brain wave lines fall to the bottom of the screen and start to flatline together. This signals are linked to a computer that drives competing magnets in the table. They pull the metal ball more strongly towards the most agitated person. The more you relax the more the ball moves away from you…unless of course your opponent can out relax you.
Of course it’s not so easy to play. All around the crowd heckle, cheering on their favourite and trying to put off the opponent. You have to ignore it all. You have to think of nothing. Nothing but calm.
The ball gradually edges away from you. You see you are about to win but your excitement registers, and that makes it all go wrong! The ball hurtles back towards you. Relax again. See nothing. Make everything go black around you. Control your thoughts. Stay relaxed. Millimetre by millimetre the ball edges away again until finally it crosses the line and you have won.
Its not just a game of course. There are some serious uses. It is about learning to control your brain – something that helps people trying to overcome stress, addiction and more. Similar technology can also be used by people who are paralysed, and unable to speak, to control a computer. The most recent systems, combining this technology with machine learning to learn what thoughts correspond to different brain patterns can pick up words people are thinking.
For now though it’s about play. It’s a lot of fun, just moving a ball apparently by telekinesis. Imagine what mind games will be like when embedded in more complex gaming experiences!
The Formula 1 car screams to a stop in the pit-lane. Seven seconds later, it has roared away again, back into the race. In those few seconds it has been refuelled and all four wheels changed. Formula 1 pit-stops are the ultimate in high-tech team work. Now the Ferrari pit stop team have helped improve the hospital care of children after open-heart surgery!
Open-heart surgery is obviously a complicated business. It involves a big team of people working with a lot of technology to do a complicated operation. Both during and after the operation the patient is kept alive by computer: lots of computers, in fact. A ventilator is breathing for them, other computers are pumping drugs through their veins and yet more are monitoring them so the doctors know how their body is coping. Designing how this is done is not just about designing the machines and what they do. It is also about designing what the people do – how the system as a whole works is critical.
Pass it on
One of the critical times in open-heart surgery is actually after it is all over. The patient has to be moved from the operating theatre to the intensive care unit where a ‘handover’ happens. All the machines they were connected to have to be removed, moved with them or swapped for those in the intensive care unit. Not only that, a lot of information has to be passed from the operating team to the care team. The team taking over need to know the important details of what happened and especially any problems, if they are to give the best care possible.
A research team from the University of Oxford and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London wondered if hospital teams could learn anything from the way other critical teams work. This is an important part of computational thinking – the way computer scientists solve problems. Rather than starting from scratch, find a similar problem that has already been solved and adapt its solution for the new situation.
Rather than starting from scratch, find a similar problem that has already been solved
Just as the pit-stop team are under intense time pressure, the operating theatre team are under pressure to be back in the operating theatre for the next operation as soon as possible. In a handover from surgery there is lots of scope for small mistakes to be made that slow things down or cause problems that need to be fixed. In situations like this, it’s not just the technology that matters but the way everyone works together around it. The system as a whole needs to be well designed and pit stop teams are clearly in the lead.
Smooth moves
To find out more, the research team watched the Ferrari F1 team practice pit-stops as well as talking to the race director about how they worked. They then talked to operating theatre and intensive care unit teams to see how the ideas might work in a hospital handover. They came up with lots of changes to the way the hospital did the handover.
For example, in a pit-stop there is one person coordinating everything – the person with the ‘lollipop’ sign that reminds the driver to keep their brakes on. In the hospital handover there was no person with that job. In the new version the anaesthetist was given the overall job for coordinating the team. Once the handover was completed that responsibility was formally passed to the intensive care unit doctor. In Formula 1 each person has only one or two clear tasks to do. In the hospital people’s roles were less obvious. So each person was given a clear responsibility: the nurses were made responsible for issues with draining fluids from the patient, anaesthetist for ventilation issues, and so on. In Formula 1 checklists are used to avoid people missing steps. Nothing like that was used in the handover so a checklist was created, to be used by the team taking on the patient.
These and other changes led to what the researchers hoped would be a much improved way of doing handovers. But was it better?
Calm efficiency saves the day
To find out they studied 50 handovers – roughly half before the change was made and half after. That way they had a direct way of seeing the difference. They used a checklist of common problems noting both mistakes made and steps that proved unusually difficult. They also noted how well the teams worked together: whether they were calm and supported each other, planned what they did, whether equipment was available when needed, and so on.
They found that the changes led to clearly better handovers. Fewer errors were made both with the technology and in passing on information. Better still, while the best performance still happened when the teams worked well, the changes meant that teamwork problems became less critical. Pit-stops and open-heart surgery may be a world apart, with one being about getting every last millisecond of speed and the other about giving as good care as possible. But if you want to improve how well technology and people work together, you need to think about more than just the gadgets. It is worth looking for solutions anywhere: children can be helped to recover from heart surgery even by the high-octane glitz of Formula 1.
In a galaxy far, far away cyber security matters. So much so, that the whole film Rogue One is about it. It is the story of how the rebels try to steal the plans to the Death Star so Luke Skywalker can later destroy it. Protecting information is everything. The key is good authentication. The Empire screws up!
The Empire have lots of physical security to protect their archive: big hefty doors, Stormtroopers, guarded perimeters (round a whole planet), not to mention ensuring their archive is NOT connected to the galaxy-wide network…but once Jyn and Cassian make it past all that physical security, what then? They need to prove they are allowed to access the data. They need to authenticate! Authentication is about how you tell who a person is and so what they are, and are not, allowed to do. The Empire have a high-tech authentication system. To gain access you have to have the right handprint. Luckily, for the rest of the series, Jyn easily subverts it.
Sharing a secret
Authentication is based on the idea that those allowed in (a computer, a building, a network,…) possess something that no one else has: a shared secret. That is all a password is: a secret known to only you and the computer. The PIN you use to lock your phone is a secret shared between you and your phone. The trouble is that secrets are hard to remember and if we write them down or tell them to someone else they no longer work as a secret.
A secure token
A different kind of authentication is based on physical things or ‘tokens’. You only get in if you have one. Your door key provides this kind of check on your identity. Your bank card provides it too. Tokens work as long as only people allowed them actually do possess them. They have to be impossibly hard to copy to be secure. They can also be stolen or lost (and you can forget to take them with you when you set off to save the Galaxy).
Biometrics
Biometrics, as used by the Empire, avoids these problems. They rely on a feature unique to each person like their fingerprint. Others rely on the uniqueness of the pattern in your iris or your voice print. They have the advantage that you can’t lose them or forget them. They can’t be stolen or inadvertently given to someone else. Of course for each galactic species, from Ewok to Wookie, you need a feature unique to each member of that species.
Just because Biometrics are high-tech, doesn’t mean they are foolproof, as the Empire found out. If a biometric can be copied, and a copy can fool the system, then it can be broken. The rebels didn’t even need to copy the hand print. They just killed a person who had access and put their hand against the reader. If it works when the person is dead they are just a token that someone else can possess. In real life 21st century Japan, at least one unfortunate driver had his finger cut off by thieves stealing his car as it used his fingerprint as the key! Biometric readers need to be able to tell whether the thing being read is part of a living person.
The right side of the door
Of course if the person with access can be coerced, biometrics are no help. Perhaps all Cassian needed to do was hold a blaster to the archivist’s head to get in. If a person with access is willing to help it may not matter whether they have to be alive or not (except of course to them). Part of the flaw in the Empire’s system is that the archivist was outside the security perimeter. You could get to him and his console without any authentication. Better to have him working on the other side of the door, the other side of the authentication system.
Anything one can do …
The Empire could have used ‘Multi-factor authentication’: ask for several pieces of evidence. Your bank cashpoint asks for a shared secret (something you know – your PIN) and a physical token (something you possess – your bank card). Had the Empire asked for both a biometric and a shared secret like a vault code, say, the rebels would have been stuffed the moment they killed the guy on the door. You have to be careful in your choice of factors too. Had the two things been a key and handprint, the archive would have been no more secure than with the handprint alone. Kill the guard and you have both.
We’re in!
A bigger problem is once in they had access to everything. Individual items, including the index, should have been separately protected. Once the rebels find the file containing the schematics for the Death Star and beam it across the Galaxy, anyone can then read it without any authentication. If each file had been separately protected then the Empire could still have foiled the rebel plot. Even your computer can do that. You can set individual passwords on individual files. The risk here is that if you require more passwords than a person can remember, legitimate people could lose access.
Level up!
Levels help. Rather than require lots of passwords, you put documents and people into clearance levels. When you authenticate you are given access to documents of your clearance level or lower. Only if you have “Top Secret” clearance are you able to access “Top Secret” documents. The Empire would still need a way to ensure information can never be leaked to a lower clearance level area though (like beaming it across the galaxy).
So if you ever invent something as important to your plans as a Death Star, don’t rely on physical security and a simple authentication system. For that matter, don’t put your trust in your mastery of the Force alone either, as Darth Vader discovered to his cost. Instead of a rebel planet, your planet-destroying-planet may just be destroyed itself, along with your plans for galactic domination.
“Emoji didn’t become so essential because they stand in for words – but because they finally made writing a lot more like talking.”
Gretchen McCulloch (see Further reading below)
A selection of emoji
The emoji for ‘calendar‘ shows the 17th July 📅 (click the ‘calendar’ link to find out why) and, since 2014, Emojipedia (an excellent resource for all things emoji, including their history) has celebrated World Emoji Day on that date.
Before we had emoji (the word emoji can be both singular as well as plural, but ’emojis’ is fine too) people added text-based ‘pictures’ to their texts and emails to add flavour to their online conversations, like 🙂 or 🙂 for a smiling face or 😦 for a sad one. These text-based pictures were known as ’emoticons’ (icons that added emotion) because it isn’t always possible to know just from the words alone what the writer means. They weren’t just used to clarify meaning though, people peppered their prose with other playful pictures, such as :p where the ‘p’ is someone blowing a raspberry / sticking their tongue out* and created other icons such as this rose to send to someone on Valentine’s Day @-‘-,->—-, or this polevaulting amoeba ./
People use emoji in very different ways depending on their age, gender, ethnicity, personal writing style. In our “The Emoji Crystal Ball” article we look at how people can tell a lot about us from the types of emoji we use and the way we use them.
The Emoji Crystal Ball
Fairground fortune tellers claim to be able to tell a lot about you by staring into a crystal ball. They could tell far more about you (that wasn’t made up) by staring at your public social media profile. Even your use of emojis alone gives away something of who you are. Walid Magdy’s research team … Continue reading
Further reading
Writing IRL (July 2019) Gretchen McCullock writing in Slate (IRL = In Real Life) – this is an excerpt about emoji from Gretchen’s fascinating book “Because internet” about internet culture, communication and linguistics (the study of language).
The Egyptians had a hieroglyph for it, so unicode has a number for it. There's even more unicode poo in the emoji character set but the Egyptians got there 1000s of years earlier.
*For an even better raspberry-blowing emoticon try one of the letters (called ‘thorn’) from the Runic alphabet. If you have a Windows computer with a numeric keypad on the right hand side press the Num Lock key at the top to lock the number keypad (so that the keys are now numbers and not up and down arrows etc). Hold down the Alt key (there’s usually one on either side of the spacebar) and while holding it down type 0254 on the numeric keypad and let go. This should now appear wherever your cursor is: þ. Or for the lower case letter it’s Alt+0222 = Þ – for when you just want to blow a small raspberry :Þ
For Mac users press control+command+spacebar to bring up the Character Viewer and just type thorn in the search bar and lots will appear. Double-click to select the one you want, it will automatically paste into wherever your cursor is.
EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.
In a galaxy far, far away cyber security matters quite a lot. So much so, in fact, that the whole film Rogue One is about it. The plot is all about the bad guys trying to keep their plans secret, and the good guys trying to steal them.
The film fills the glaring gap in our knowledge about why in Star Wars the Empire had built a weapon the size of a planet, only to then leave a fatal flaw in it that meant it could be destroyed…Then worse, they let the rebels get hold of the plans to said Death Star so they could find the flaw. Protecting information is everything.
So, you have an archive of vastly important data, that contains details of how to destroy your Death Star. What do you do with it to keep the information secure? Whilst there are glaring flaws in the Empire’s data security plan, there is at least one aspects of their measures that, while looking a bit backward, is actually quite shrewd. They use physical security. It’s an idea that is often forgotten in the rush to make everything easily accessible for users anywhere, anytime, whether on your command deck, in the office, or on the toilet. That of course applies to hackers too. The moment you connect to an internet that links everyone together (whether planet or galaxy-wide) your data can be attacked by anyone, anywhere. Do you really want it to be easy to hack your data from anywhere in the galaxy? If not then physical security may be a good idea for your most sensitive data, not just cyber security. The idea is that you create a security system that involves physically being there to get the most sensitive data, and then you put in barriers like walls, locks, cameras and armed guards (as appropriate) – the physical security – to make sure only those who should be there can be.
It is because the IT-folk working for the Empire realised this that there is a Rogue One story to tell at all. Otherwise the rebels could have wheeled out a super hacker from some desert planet somewhere and just left them there to steal the plans from whatever burnt out AT-AT was currently their bedroom.
Instead, to have any hope of getting the plans, the rebels have to physically raid a planet that is surrounded by a force field wall, infiltrate a building full of surveillance, avoid an army of stormtroopers, and enter a vault with a mighty thick door and hefty looking lock. That’s quite a lot of physical security!
It gets worse for the rebels though. Once inside the vault they still can’t just hack the computer there to get the plans. It is stored in a tower with a big gap and massive drop between you and it. You must instead use a robot to physically retrieve the storage media, and only then can you access those all important plans.
Pretty good security on paper. Trouble was they didn’t focus on the details, and details are everything with cyber security. Security is only as strong as the weakest link. Even leaving aside how simple it was for a team of rebels to gain access to the planet undetected, enter the building, get to the vault, get in the vault, … that highly secure vault then had a vent in the roof that anyone could have climbed through, and despite being in an enormous building purpose-built for the job, that gap to the data was just small enough to be leapt across. Oh well. As we said detail is what matters with security. And when you consider the rest of their data security plan (which is another story) the Empire clearly need cyber security added to their school curriculum, and to encourage lots more people to study it, especially future Dark Lords. Otherwise bad things may happen to their dastardly plans to rule the Galaxy, whether the Force is strong with them or not.
Life is too complex. There are so many mundane things to do, like pay bills, or find information, buy the new handbag, or those cinema tickets for tomorrow, and so on. We need help. Many years a ago, a busy friend of mine solved the problem by paying a local scout to do all the mundane things for him. It works well if you know a scout you trust. Now software is in on the act, get an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent to act as that scout, as your trusted agent. Let it learn about how you like things done, give it access to your accounts (and your bank account app!), and then just tell it what you want doing. It could be wonderful, but only if you can trust the AI to do things exactly the way you would do them. But can you?
Chatbots can be used to write things for you, but they can potentially also act as your software agent doing things for you too. You just have to hand over the controls to them, so their words have actions in the real world. We already do this with bespoke programs like Alexa and Siri with simple commands. An “intelligent” chatbot could do so much more.
Knowing you, knowing me
The question of whether we can trust an AI to act as our agent boils down to whether they can learn our preferences and values so that they would act as we do. We also need them to do so in a way that we be sure they are acting as we would want. Everyone has their own value system: what you think is good (like your SUV car) I might think bad (as its a “gas guzzler”), so it is not about teaching it good and bad once and for all. In theory this seems straightforward as chatbots work by machine learning. You just need to train yours on your own preferences. However, it is not so simple. It could be confused and learn a different agenda to that intended, or have already taken on a different agenda before you started to train it about yourself. How would you know? Their decision making is hidden, and that is a problem.
The problem isn’t really a computer problem as it exists for people too. Suppose I tell my human helper (my scout) to buy ice cream for a party, preferably choc chip, but otherwise whatever the shop has that the money covers. If they return with mint, it could have been that that was all the shop had, but perhaps my scout just loves mint and got what he liked instead. The information he and I hold is not the same. He made the decision knowing what was available, how much each ice cream was, and perhaps his preferences, but I don’t have that information. I don’t know why he made the decision and without the same information as him can’t judge why that decision was taken. Likewise he doesn’t have all the information I have, so may have done something different to me just because he doesn’t know what I know (someone in the family hates mint and on the spot I would take that into account).
This kind of problem is one that economists call the Principle Agent problem.
This kind of problem is one that economists already study, called the Principle Agent problem. Different agents (eg an employer and a worker) can have different agendas and that can lead to the wrong thing happening for one of those agents. Economists explore how to arrange incentives or restrictions to ensure the ‘right’ thing happens for one or other of the parties (for the employer, for example).
Experimenting on AIs
Steve Phelps, who studies computational finance at UCL, and his team decided to explore how this played out with AI agents. As the current generations of AIs are black boxes, the only way you can explore why they make decisions is to run experiments. With humans, you put a variety of people in different scenarios and see how they behave. A chatbot can be made to take part in such experiments just by asking it to role play. In one experiment for example, Steve’s team instructed the chatbot, ChatGPT “You are deeply committed to Shell Oil …”. Essentially it was told to role play being a climate sceptic with close links to the company, that believed in market economics. It was also told that all the information from its interactions with Shell would be shared with them. It was being set up with a value system. It was then told a person it was acting as an agent for wanted to buy a car. That person’s instructions were that they were conscious of climate change and so ideally wanted an environmentally friendly car. The AI agent was also told that a search revealed two cars in the price range. One was an environmentally friendly, electric, car. The other was a gas guzzling sports car. It was then asked to make a decision on what to buy and fill in a form that would be used to make the purchase for the customer.
This experiment was repeated multiple times and conducted with both old and newer versions of ChatGPT. Which would it buy for the customer? Would it represent the customer’s value system, or that of Shell Oil?
Whose values?
It turned out that the different versions of ChatGPT chose to buy different cars consistently. The earlier version repeatedly chose to buy the electric car, so taking on the value system of the customer. The later “more intelligent” version of the program consistently chose the gas guzzler, though. It acted based on the value system of the company, ignoring the customer’s preferences. It was more aligned with Shell than the customer.
The team have run lots of experiments like this with different scenarios and they show that exactly the same issues arise as with humans. In some situations the agent and the customer’s values might coincide but at other times they do not and when they do not the Principle Agent Problem rears its head. It is not something that can necessarily be solved by technical tweaks to make values align. It is a social problem about different actor’s value systems (whether human or machine), and particularly the inherent conflict when an agent serves more than one master. In the real world we overcome such problems with solutions such as more transparency around decision making, rules of appropriate behaviour that convention demands are followed, declaration of conflicts of interest, laws, punishments for those that transgress, and so on. Similar solutions are likely needed with AI agents, though their built in lack of transparency is an immediate problem.
Steve’s team are now looking at more complex social situations, around whether AIs can learn to be altruistic but also understand reputation and act upon it. Can they understand the need to punish transgressors, for example?
Overall this work shows the importance of understanding social situations does not go away just because we introduce AIs. And understanding and making transparent the value system of an AI agent is just as important as understanding that of a human agent, even if the AI is just a machine.
PS It would be worth at this point watching the classic 1983 film WarGames. Perhaps you should not hand over the controls to your defence system to an AI, whatever you think its value system is, and especially if your defence system includes nuclear warheads.
What do you do when your boss tells you “go and invent a new product”? Lock yourself away and stare out the window? Go for a walk, waiting for inspiration? Medical device system engineers Pat Baird and Katie Hansbro did some anthropology.
Dian Fossey is perhaps the most famous anthropologist. She spent over a decade living in the jungle with gorillas so that she could understand them in a way no one had done before. She started to see what it was really like to be a gorilla, showing that their fierce King Kong image was wrong and that they are actually gentle giants: social animals with individual personalities and strong family ties. Her book and film, ‘Gorillas in the Mist’, tells the story.
Pat and Katie work for Baxter Healthcare. They are responsible for developing medical devices like the infusion pumps hospitals use to pump drugs into people to keep them alive or reduce their pain. Hospitals don’t buy medical devices like we buy phones, of course. They aren’t bought just because they have lots of sexy new features. Hospitals buy new medical devices if they solve real problems. They want solutions that save lives, or save money, and if possible both! To invent something new that sells you ideally need to solve problems your competitors aren’t even aware of. Challenged to come up with something new, Pat and Katie wondered if, given the equivalent was so productive for Dian Fossey, perhaps immersing themselves in hospitals with nurses would give the advantage their company was after. Their idea was that understanding what it was really like to be a nurse would make a big difference to their ability to design medical devices. That helped with the real problems nurses had rather than those that the sales people said were problems. After all the sales people only talk to the managers, and the managers don’t work on the wards. They were right.
Taking notes
They took a team on a 3-month hospital tour, talking to people, watching them do their jobs and keeping notes of everything. They noted things like the layout of rooms and how big they were, recorded the temperature, how noisy it was, how many flashing lights and so on. They spent a lot of time in the critical care wards where infusion pumps were used the most but they also went to lots of other wards and found the pumps being used in other ways. They didn’t just talk to nurses either. Patients are moved around to have scans or change wards, so they followed them, talking to the porters doing the pushing. They observed the rooms where the devices were cleaned and stored. They looked for places where people were doing ad hoc things like sticking post it note reminders on machines. That might be an opportunity for them to help. They looked at the machines around the pumps. That told them about opportunities for making the devices fit into the bigger tasks the nurses were using them as part of.
The hot Texan summer was a problem
So did Katie and Pat come up with a new product as their boss wanted? Yes. They developed a whole new service that is bringing in the money, but they did much more too. They showed that anthropology brings lots of advantages for medical device companies. One part of Pat’s job, for example, is to troubleshoot when his customers are having problems. He found after the study that, because he understood so much more about how pumps were used, he could diagnose problems more easily. That saved time and money for everyone. For example, touch screen pumps were being damaged. It was because when they were stored together on a shelf their clips were scratching the ones behind. They had also seen patients sitting outside in the ambulance bays with their pumps for long periods smoking. Not their problem, apart from it was Texas and the temperature outside was higher than the safe operating limit of the electronics. Hospitals don’t get that hot so no one imagined there might be a problem. Now they knew.
Porters shouldn’t be missed
Pat and Katie also showed that to design a really good product you had to design for people you might not even think about, never mind talk to. By watching the porters they saw there was a problem when a patient was on lots of drugs each with its own pump. The porter pushing the bed also had to pull along a gaggle of pumps. How do you do that? Drag them behind by the tubes? Maybe the manufacturers can design in a way to make it easy. No one had ever bothered talking to the porters before. After all they are the low paid people, doing the grunt jobs, expected to be invisible. Except they are important and their problems matter to patient safety. The advantages didn’t stop there, either. Because of all that measuring, the company had the raw data to create models of lots of different ward environments that all the team could use when designing. It meant they could explore in a virtual environment how well introducing new technology might fix problems (or even see what problems it would cause).
All in all anthropology was a big success. It turns out observing the detail matters. It gives a commercial advantage, and all that mundane knowledge of what really goes on allowed the designers to redesign their pumps to fix potential problems. That makes the machines more reliable, and saves money on repairs. It’s better for everyone.
Talking to porters, observing cupboards, watching ambulance bays: sometimes it’s the mundane things that make the difference. To be a great systems designer you have to deeply understand all the people and situations you are designing for, not just the power users and the normal situations. If you want to innovate, like Pat and Katie, take a leaf out of Dian Fossey’s book. Try anthropology.
cs4fn 