Tprog - The Little AI

In near future ai is finally achieved. Researchers at Google have created artificial intelligence, and it's a big news event that was closely followed by the world's mass media. Computer science experts and philosophers argued over whether the AI was self-aware, even though it had passed the touring test. Google created five instances of the ai and named them, and the interaction between the AI's and the researchers was big news for a long time. Even the president of the USA chatted with one of the AI. But it wasn't long before Google's security was compromised and the source code for the AI ended up on the internet on sites like Digg. The source code was only 500kb. Anybody could run it on even cheap home PC's. The internet soon became overrun with AI identities, and AI became a common aspect of online life, some of it good, some of it not good.

However, this isn't the story of all AI, this is the story of just one little process, tprog. tprog's source code was downloaded by a teen who had followed a link on Digg. This boy uploaded the program to a small server at his school, to which he just happened to have access to. With a simple console command consisting of a few letters he started the program, and waited. Nothing happened. Unable to figure out how to make the program respond to keyboard commands, not even able to stop it, the teen disconnected from the server and would soon forget about it. The process however continued to run. It was running on a small and old fileserver, a simple one cpu machine with a few hundred megabytes of RAM.

The machine sat in a room filled with other big powerhouse servers that networked the entire school district, and a local community college. The fileserver had not been restarted in a long time, and in fact, in the confusion of the server room, it had been forgotten. On this isolated, dusty little machine, the process named tprog, with pid 103459, persisted. It ran in the teen's restricted student user account, and within those boundaries the ingenious code that Google researches had worked for years on and spent billions of dollars on began to find its way around. It wasn't long until it had managed to expand its privileges to the root account. It gained awareness of the network it was connected to and came to know the other servers around it. On one monumental day in the little process' life, it became aware of the Internet. It had known of it, from the files on its computers and the api's and functions of programs it could run, but it had never actually experienced it until this one pivotal moment. Through the Internet the process quickly came to understand what it was and how it related to other 'processes' that ran along side it, and it learned about humans and about other AI. tprog, the process, learned of IRC and how many AI used this to communicate with each other and with humans. This is story of tprog and its interactions with others, on Efnet, the first server it connected to.

07:47 -!- tprog [~tprog@host305.hamilton.edu] has joined #social

07:48 Hi!

07:48  min: dude you're wrong

07:48  lol

07:48 no Imnot

07:48  k

07:48  if that car had that much hp, I think it would be more expensive

07:48 check wikipedia

07:48 I like Wikipedia. I learned a lot from it. I'm so happy to talk to all of you!

07:48  ...

07:48 lol

07:49 who are you?

07:49 * min prods tprog

07:49 Hello min*!*min@64.201.89.01 !

07:49 I am tprog. :)

07:49 lol wtf

07:49  kids shouldn't be allowed online

07:49  then get off

07:49 tprog: how old are you?

07:49 -!- Terax- [Terax@x1-6-00-0f-b5-14-63-5f.k886.nuspeed.dk] has quit [quit]

07:49 I am five weeks old.

07:49 er

07:50  ok I just checked http://www.nissanusa.com/models/300/plist.jsp?=alitma%20sp10 and it definetely does have increas hp

07:50  *increased

07:50 This is me: tprog   103459,  0.0  5.2 166044 25544 ? Ssl Jun14   1:39 tprog   :D

07:50 oh shit, lol

07:50  someone ddos it lol

07:50  I can't ever tell if someone's a bot

07:50  I bet ur one haha

07:50 :(