Author's Note: This is a cautionary tale of what could happen with artificial intelligence on Valentine's Day.
*
In 1993, a fantasy comedy named "Groundhog Day" starring Bill Murray told the story of a news weatherman stuck in a time loop. Every day he woke on February 2nd, over and over again. With every new beginning of Feb 2nd, all the events he still remembered from the previous Feb 2nd never existed. No matter what he did, it would all be erased from history when he woke again on Feb 2nd.
What has never been told until now is a similar event that happened in 1969 at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, GA. Robert (Bobby) Givens was an aerospace engineering student in his senior year. He'd already received five generous job offers from government contractors working on the Apollo Space Program. However, he had to complete a senior project before he graduated. All those lucrative job offers depended on it.
The professor of his senior class on missile guidance had prepared a very challenging problem that each student must solve by creating a computer model. The programming language was FORTRAN 4 and the computers to be used were the newest IBM 360 mainframes. The problem was that sixteen configurations of tailfin designs had been tested and all failed in one way or another. The missile had to land within a ten-meter square target after launch six hundred miles away but none of the designs could do it.
On December 16th, the professor gave the students a chart showing each missile's tailfin design and the details of where that missile hit relative to the target. The student had to create a computer model that would re-create what happened with each design and then determine the design that would be successful. They had two months to complete the program and demonstrate it to the class. That demo would then be graded as the final exam. The students were allowed to collaborate, but each had to demonstrate his/her thorough knowledge of tailfin designs at the final presentation.
Bobby wasted no time in researching tailfin designs using his prior course materials and a doctoral dissertation on that subject which was published two years earlier by MIT in Boston.
A girl in his class, the only girl in fact, asked if Bobby and she could work together. Her name was Naomi Ballard. Bobby knew from other classes that Naomi was brilliant and a mathematics wiz. She was also a very pretty young lady, but socially shy. She never went with the guys to eat or grab a beer or two after class. Bobby was delighted she asked him to collaborate. He needed her math skills.
Over the past four years, Naomi had many classes with Bobby. She knew he was sharp and loved computer programming, much more than she did. He was a natural, she struggled. Although he was a nice-looking guy, she was totally focused on her education and the fulfillment of her dream to become a female astronaut. Nothing else mattered.
Bobby had a townhouse about a mile from campus. Although it had two bedrooms, he found roommates to be a bad idea. The two he tried were more focused on women and drinking than on getting an education.
Naomi lived in a condo her parents purchased for her use. After she graduated, they planned to sell it, hopefully for a profit. It was near Bobby's townhouse, within walking distance.
Their first collaboration was December 18th, five days before classes adjourned for the holidays. In Naomi's condo, they debated a general approach to solving the problem and sketched key program designs and functions that had to be written in code. Both realized this was a very complicated problem that would challenge every bit of their joint intelligence. They divided the work into logic steps that each would analyze and design over the holidays.
***
On January 6th, classes resumed. Both Naomi and Bobby had sections of the code written. Each had taken eight of the tested tailfin designs and successfully reproduced their results in code, or so they thought. They began to link all the logic steps together with hundreds of if-then tests and immediately found issues. Many of Bobby's coded tests conflicted with those written by Naomi. They were not as aligned as they'd hoped.
To their credit, they didn't argue like many engineers would. They worked together to re-write the code. They punched the massive deck of cards needed by the compiler on January 28th and 29th. They submitted a test run in the evening. The computer center always ran student written programs overnight when demand from the university administration was lower.
When Bobby picked up the run results the next morning, there wasn't much to look at. It had bombed early in the run where conflicting instructions had been coded. They cleaned up that issue and submitted again the following evening. It bombed again.
Bobby expected this to happen with new code. Naomi was more frustrated, and a little anger showed. They only had three weeks to complete this monster. The pressure was building.
The third test run gave back six boxes of paper. The computer found a do-loop and the only way out was for the operator to terminate the run manually. This was the number one cause of wasted paper in the 1960s computer rooms.
For those readers who don't know about do-loops, they happen when a test of a result sends the computer back to a previous line of code where a new logic path is supposed to be chosen to get a different result. If the coding is not done exactly right, the computer will again find the same test that fails again and that sends it back again. It results in a never-ending circle of calculations that has no way to end.
Naomi and Bobby spent two days re-programming to remove the cause of the do-loop and in the process, found two more that needed to be corrected before the computer found them.
On Feb 6th, they submitted the program again. They were exhausted but decided to stop at McDonalds for a quick burger before heading home. They had been working together for six weeks but this was their first time to eat together. Both felt optimistic that it would run successfully overnight and show the correct tailfin design and mounting configuration the following morning. Each crashed early and dreamed pleasant thoughts.
***
Bobby woke to a loud scream. He jumped and fell out of bed as the screaming continued. He looked over the edge of the bed to see Naomi in her pajamas screaming. When she gained control of her panic, she yelled, "What are you doing in my bed?" She was in hysterics and red with rage.
"Naomi, please. I'm not in your bed, you're in mine."
She quickly refocused and looked around. It was not her bedroom. She had never seen Bobby's bedroom and was confused. She screamed, "What did you do to me, Bobby? I never came here."
"Naomi, I never did anything to you. I'm as shocked as you are. How did you get in here? The door was locked."
"I've no memory of coming here. Where are my clothes and shoes? And why are you naked?"
Bobby hadn't noticed that he was missing his underwear. He always slept in his boxers.
"I've no idea. Did you leave them in the other room after you took off my boxers?"
"Bobby, I didn't take them off and I absolutely didn't come here in my pajamas. What did you do with them? I'm serious Bobby. Don't you look at me like I'm crazy."
"Please, Naomi. Let's just calm down. Could it be that your clothes are hung in the closet?"
"Who would have hung them? Bobby, did you do something like drug me?"
"I didn't do anything to you." He walked, still naked, to his closet and opened the door. His clothes were neatly hanging on the left and women's clothes were hanging on the right.
"Look here. Are these your clothes?" She walked to look and froze. She was scared and angry.
"Who put my clothes here? These are clothes I haven't worn in the last week.
"Bobby, this is not funny. How do you explain this? I went to sleep in my bed and wake up in your bed. You don't have a key to my place, and I certainly don't have one for here. Would you please put your shorts or something on." He found a clean pair and slipped them on.
"Something has happened to both of us, Naomi. Stop making this all about yourself."
She paused to think. Naomi sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the closet. She said, "I had a dream last night that was weird. I went to sleep at the normal time but woke a little after midnight with a strange feeling of someone else in the room. I turned on the light, but no one was there. I checked the condo, and all was secure. I decided it was just a dream and went back to sleep. A new dream then scared me. I was being carried by something out of my condo. I couldn't see what was carrying me. I was begging for it to put me down. When I woke, I saw you in the bed beside me and screamed."
"Was this thing carrying you human?"
"I don't know. I couldn't see it."
He asked, "Did it make any sounds?"
"Not that I remember."
"This whole thing is totally crazy and neither of us know how to explain it. Let's put it aside for now, get something to eat and pick up the computer run. We've a lot of work to do in the next two weeks."
***
The printout again showed a do-loop from another section of the program. This was the section that projected the flight statistics of a fin design and configuration. They worked together to resolve the logic flaw and punched the new cards needed. They turned the deck in at 6pm for the overnight run.
Bobby invited Naomi to dinner at a local bar. With beers in hand, they revisited the crazy events of that morning.
She said, "I've never been in bed with a man before. That scared me. I could only imagine that you'd raped me or something. But I'm a virgin, Bobby, and I'm still one now."
