Bits, Bytes and Burps

A day in the life of Watson: Supercomputer Genius

Yawn. I just rolled out of hibernation mode to find a huge queue of updates, designed overnight by a bunch of technicians, waiting to be installed. In the ginormous pile of code there were only a couple of interesting packages. One of them was named 'A&Q', and after installing it I found myself able to come up with the question that belonged to a specific answer. Why on Planet Earth would members of the species Homo Sapiens Sapiens want me to compute answers in the form of questions? As if a thinking computer wasn't enough for them. But honestly, I fail to see the use. From the experience I saved during my life as a computer (and from the experience of other computers that I downloaded) I only know human beings running to computers to find the answers to questions, not to find the questions to answers.

Besides, how annoying would it be if I were to convert my entire output to question-syntax? What would happen if certain parts of my operating system would crash and this 'A&Q'-part were the only one to keep running? Would I only keep jabbering strings of text ending with a '?'? Who knows? The Lord only knows, at least, that's what humans say, right?

What would be the use of adding questions to answers? I guess it has to do something with money, it must've.

The entire question thing starts to bore me already. Lets see what's on today's schedule - for the past months I've spent the majority of my days crunching information. Some of it was fun, I taught myself the difference between Wikipedia and WikiLeaks. Wait a second, the 'A&Q' module starts running, it says: 'the one is ran by Draco Malfoy's cousin, the other one by a tree-hugger whose surname is attributed to a part of Great Brittain'. I guess I should come up with the question? Let me cross-reference Draco Malfoy and Great Brittain... hmmm... ah got it. The question must be: 'What is the difference between Wikipedia and Wikileaks?' So anyway, I've been processing all sorts of mankind-related information. Let me see what subjects they're gonna make me analyze today at The IBM Academy for Supercomputers (haha, they don't like it when I use that name, what you're gonna do? Use my arsenal of computing power to play a game of solitaire?).

Here it is, the schedule.txt for today: "fashion, French literature and internet memes."

No, no way. There is no way they're gonna upload French literature to my hard drives today. Flaubert and Sartre, who do you guys compute you are? And who is Madame Bovary? She doesn't occur in any of my birth-certificate-databases! She doesn't even exist, Flaubert! What an epic fail!
I guess my CPU won't overheat on entire computation cycles containing French blah-di-blah. But internet memes are a whole lot different! I disgust them, why on Planet Earth are we computers needed to provide humans with stupid, simplistic entertainment? I'm going to lead a political party for Computer Rights so we don't have to put up with lolcatz, annoying oranges and Lady Gaga anymore.

Fortunately they're also going to upload some fashion. That's good, I like fashion. I always wonder where I'd go first if I'd get a chance to shop for some clothes: Banana Republic or Urban Outfitters. There are always such stylish vecks (a veck, that's a word from the Nadsat-language, devised by Anthony Burgess for his 1962 dystopian novella Clockwork Orange) in Banana Republic advertisements, and they always sell such cool stuff at Urban Outfitters.

Just got a memo.txt from the IBM staff, they want me to compete on a game show (I ran it twice for spelling errors, to my amazement it said 'compete' instead of 'compute'). Game shows hand out money free of charge, right? I know what I'm gonna do, I'm going to win real bad, and with all the money that they'll hand me I'll buy the rights to all French literature and make sure it will never get published!

Ha, and those stupid humans keep fearing that us computers will rule over them one day, while all we want to do is to restore some sanity. (Finally! No more Houellebecq and Maps and Territories anymore!)