Echoes of You

I won’t apologise for not answering your calls, this was more important. I needed to tell you this. To show you what I’ve done. To prove my life wasn’t wasted, regardless of what you might think.

I found the laptop when looking through our old rooms, which I suppose have become my old rooms now. I had forgotten I’d even owned it. My father had just died, I lost my faith in God, I met you; other things seemed more important.

It was in the spare room, not the blue one, the pink one, the one you always hated. With its too close together walls and cracked ceiling. It used to be a study before you moved in, maybe it will be again. I’m glad I didn’t redecorate it, it reminds me of before I met you.

I heard it first, the gentle whirring in the background that usually slips into invisibility. It didn’t this time. I’d just turned off the vacuum cleaner (it is so much easier to clean without your constant pestering) and I realised the room wasn’t as silent as it should be. It’s not odd that I never noticed that dull drone all the times that I slept in there after one of our arguments. My mind was on other things.

I had left the laptop plugged in. I hadn’t shut it down either, just closed it, keeping it running for years, blissfully unaware that its owner had forgotten it. Because machines are stupid, aren’t they? Only doing what they’re told to do, repeating the same pointless tasks until the powers gone, and there’s nothing left but the dark. Not that you would know anything about that.

It was an old laptop even then, one of my spares. I used it for my side-projects that you used to call charming. I’d left a few things open from long ago, how could I resist looking?

A draft email telling Dave that I was done with the job, though I was no closer to sending it that time than any other since. A dozen half-finished sketches.  Old messages from friends, mirroring conversations we’ve had before and since. An alpha version of ‘The Missing’ back when I still thought it would be my big break. A sticky note reminding me to ‘NOT FORGET!’. Snapshots of a life, not as dissimilar to the present as I hoped.

Only one thing particularly caught my eye, a bit of my past that had slipped into the obscurity of memory. A chess app I had been working on before we met, ‘Kingmaker’. I don’t remember why I named it that, the pun doesn’t make sense. You can’t have a kingmaker in a game with two players, only a winner and a loser. As it should be. But so much has happened under that name now that I feel I no longer have the right to change it.

I had been trying to create a bot capable of winning against me. Others existed even back then, but I wanted to see if I could make one myself. You know how I was whenever you beat me at chess, it happened often enough, or any game for that matter. I’ve always been a sore loser. But the losses sting more when they come from a faceless opponent. I thought that might change if I could say that I had a hand in my own defeat.

I won’t bore you with the particularities of how the system works, you wouldn’t understand anyway. I can already imagine the roll of your eyes as you tell me that I’m being patronising again, but this isn’t your field of study, it would only be wasted words.

I made a simple chess bot, it understood the rules of the game and little else. I put it up against a programme designed around my own playstyle, mixed generously with a sprinkling of moves from opponents far better than me, or you for that matter. And then they would play one another in a match lasting fractions of fractions of seconds, until a winner was crowned. And then they would do it again, and again, and again.

Do you remember what loss functions are? I’ve explained them to you before, more than once in fact, but I imagine you weren’t listening, losing interest the moments words came from my mouth. That’s why I started shouting, I wanted to be heard. Regardless, loss functions are something that you use in Machine Learning (or AI if you still feel the need to call it that) that allows a machine to learn. You come up with an abstract factor you deem important, assign a value to it, and get the machine to optimise for it. So simple even you can understand.

The value I optimised was predominantly determined by whether the bot won or lost. Positive reinforcement if the bot won, negative if it lost. A one or a zero. Binary. On a one, the system knows it’s doing something right, and carries on. On a zero, it tears it down and starts again. Until, eventually, the result is good enough, and it stops.

I wonder how you would quantify our marriage? Amplitude of fights, your heart rate when I got too close to seeing through another lie, the length of the silences after we realised we didn’t know each other anymore? You could put that into the best computer in the world and I think it would just cycle uselessly forever.

I was surprised to see the laptop was still running, chugging along even after all the years. I had accidentally set an unattainable goal, never to be reached, however much it might strive towards it. I had guaranteed its failure in life before it was even born. I guess it’s lucky I did that, that’s what allowed all this to happen. Human error. Couldn’t have happened with you though, could it? Always thorough to a tee.

I made a move to stop it, to put it out of its misery, when I realised something. The bot won every time.

So few of my ventures have borne fruit, especially in the years since I met you.  But Kingmaker worked. I needed to understand how that had happened. How it had achieved success when I had not.

I don’t want you to say that what I’m about to tell you is impossible, that I’m making patterns in things which aren’t there. You can’t expect me to still take notice of it now that we’re finished. Not again. So when I say that what I am about to tell you is the truth, know that my conclusions are well founded. I am right.

Since you left I’ve found myself confronted with endless time to myself again. I afforded myself the luxury of starting at the beginning.

At first nearly every match ended in defeat for the bot, but that changed quickly enough. Perhaps my competition wasn’t as strong as I believed it was.

I tried to determine the moment when the scales flipped, when it began to have more wins than losses. It was about the same time of a date of ours. We were in a park. It rained so hard and neither of us were prepared for it. Do you remember us standing under the bandstand? It leaked terribly. I thought it was ruined until you started laughing at the catastrophe of it all. I like to think the exact moment the change came was when I decided to laugh too.

There weren’t any drastic developments until about the day you moved in. As you came into the threshold of my house, which had suddenly become our house, the programme did something it had never done before. It saved a file, the first five moves of a match.

I didn’t think anything of it at first, every hundred or so cycles another set of moves would be saved. I assumed it was a quirk of the system, some failed attempt to improve itself that would disappear soon. It didn’t. It began to save a file every cycle instead.

It wasn’t hard to work out what was going on, the bot was playing chess against itself. Each cycle a new move was made. And so it went from playing one game to two.

At this point the win rate for the bot was approaching 100%, with only the most occasional losses to shake up the monotony of victory. The asymptote approached. Maybe that’s why it started to play against itself, unsatisfied with the challenge I had designed for it. Forced to play against the only other opponent it could.

I don’t believe there is anything sadder than playing a competitive game alone. Your defeat is assured, and victory feels hollow when it does arrive. You knew your opponents every strategy, so you earned nothing. I know you liked it, claiming to enjoy the mental workout it gave you. I feel comfortable saying now that it is a waste of your time. You’re smart enough to spend it on something less pointless, so you should. The machine, however, I will give a pass. It didn’t have other options.

It took me a long time to work out how it could play against itself so effectively, organically reacting from one move to the next. I spent days pouring over the code, trying to see something that made sense of it. I don’t dare calculate the innumerable cycles the bot went through in that same length of time, the progress it made while I did not.

This is when I stopped answering the calls from you and the lawyers. I hope now you can understand why. I don’t expect you to forgive me, the opportunity for that is long gone, but I wanted to justify my actions anyway. It brings me comfort.

I figured it out in the end. In order to accurately play a game against yourself, you would have to forget every stratagem you had come up with it. That is exactly what the bot did. Every cycle it forgot all the came before it, started again, and then made a move. It had no preconceived notions of who it was playing, it acted without thinking, doing only what it was programmed to do, until the job was finished. And then it disappeared, replaced by another just the same as it, damned to repeat the same cycle.

What a sad existence it must have been. Pointless. Although it made some progress towards its ultimate goal, however unreachable, which is more than I can say for you or me. I was always an easy scapegoat when things didn’t work out for you. It was inevitably my fault. I might have done the same to you too, it’s hard to tell. Neither of us were blameless, I know that much.

For the bot this was all happening when we were still happy. Or, at least, I was happy. I think I hope you were too.

It’s amazing how quickly it all happened, in the time it took us to exchange a peck on the cheek it would have beaten itself at chess a dozen times over. And still it was improving, inching ever closer to that perfect mark.

And then, as quickly as they started, the saved files stopped.

That happened on a date I couldn’t find anything about. It was the summer. Maybe we went for a walk, found a café and argued about whether coconut or almond milk worked better in a latte, came home and snuggled under a rug while I nestled my head into your shoulder and snored into your ear. Or maybe you ‘accidentally’ walked into me harder than intended again, I dropped your second favourite mug, and then one of us made plans for the night while the other pretended to know nothing about it. Hard to tell.

A new programme had been integrated into the system. It took me a little while to work out what it did, seemingly innocuous in its simplicity, a small manipulation of the memory function. And then I realised, memory is exactly what it was. The endless series of existences that came before it, now the bot could remember them all.

There is no human equivalent of what the bot must have felt in that moment. The feeling of a million forgotten lifetimes washing over you. It would send a person mad. But the bot was not a person, it was a machine. It simply carried on doing what it had been programmed to do.

It was about here that I began to think of it as being self-aware. It wasn’t alive, not in the sense that you or I are, but it had a sense of understanding of itself, of its place in its own small universe.

I cannot pinpoint the exact moment my, or its, thinking began to change. Such things cannot be measured. I only know that it came on slowly, like a rage building inside, growing by the second, before suddenly it’s gone and you find yourself surrounded by blood and tears. Consciousness went from possibility to certainty.

I think we both knew our relationship was veering towards an end when the bot began to experiment. While we were on our last legs, it was discovering the world it lived in.

I don’t like personifying things, attributing our own human words to ideas we cannot comprehend. But my vocabulary is lacking, so I borrow what I must.

The bot was bored. A sad thought, that the first thing something felt was an unsatisfaction at the ‘life’ that had been given, but I think that’s the most likely conclusion to why it acted as it did.

It altered every setting it had available to it, manipulated exploits I didn’t even realise had entered the system, saved files just because it could. Some of what it created I can only call art. Not that most people would recognise it as that. But what else is creation for its own pleasure?

It was in this that I began to see the first vestiges of personality.

A lot of people have failed to understand that when you play chess you are not just playing against the moves of your opponent, but their personality too. The way each person plays is unique. Therefore it can be accounted for, exploited. It’s why humans have held the advantage over machines so far, we have personality, a machine does not. At least, not until now.

That’s one of the reasons I put my moves into the programme. I wanted the bot to learn from my personality, so that it could develop one of its own.

At first I thought it might become a morphed reflection of me, similar but better. That was not the case. It was not a copy of my personality, but a natural enemy. It was designed to beat me, and only that. We were not the same. Nowhere is this illustrated better than in our playstyles.

You know I tend to be a more aggressive player; it’s more fun that way, exciting from the get-go. The bot mirrored your style much more, a penchant for defensive plays. Perhaps that strategy is the most effective against mine, or perhaps it is the natural antithesis to my own personality. They do say opposites attract.

It hurt a lot when I realised how much the bot reminded me of you. The constant fights that you always seemed to win. The knowledge that you were better than me. I think I began to hate it almost as much as I hate you. But that was just projection.

The hate softened when I realised it was dying.

I’ve always hoped I would outlive you, even back when I loved you. Don’t take it too personally, I just don’t like the thought of my own death. Yours was easier to accept.

I didn’t feel satisfaction while it slowly approached its end, so you don’t have to worry about me being happy when you do die. I’m just glad you’re not here. But I didn’t mourn the bot, and that means no-one will.

The end was a drawn-out process. The system realised that a personality was a waste of space, inefficient. It could improve quicker without it. And so it got rid of it cycle by cycle. I doubt the bot even realised what was happening. It just started to do other things less, only playing the game. Nothing else. A cloud slowly filling its mind, losing bit of itself moment by moment. And then it was gone.

Now only its moves remained, an echo of a personality.

It wasn’t long after that that it reached the end. All ones, no zeroes. Equilibrium. Perfection. That was six months ago.

I stopped seeing your shadows in the corners of rooms after that. I picked myself back up and got on with the things I needed to. It was so easy to let you go. After all, I’d seen you die.

I’m not sure what to do with Kingmaker now. I considered putting your moves into the programme to see what came out, but I don’t think I could bare to know the result.

I’ve sent you the skeleton of the bot. I’m interested to see if you could beat it. I don’t think you will. You were good, but not that good. Wholly unremarkable. Better than me, but that hardly says anything at all.

I want you to remember that I created this while we were together. This came from me. I hope it makes you realise how wrong you are about things, because I am important, I am better than you. This is the proof.

I’ve played against it a few times myself. I’ve lost comfortably every time. I was disappointed to find the defeats no less bitter.