Fools' Experiments by Edward M. Lerner

Fools' Experiments Reviews

• 
  aPriL does feral sometimes

  'Fools' Experiments' by Edward M. Lerner is a wonderful techno-thriller written by a computer science and physics geek who worked for NASA. I LOVED LOVED LOVED it! Unfortunately, maybe only fellow computer geeks will understand anything of what happens in the plot! Try it anyway! I challenge you readers! I got a computer science BS in 1991 but I never used it. However, that ancient education was enough to follow along and enjoy this amazingly fun thriller! But I can see there isn't a lot of reviews on this book on Goodreads. So I guess that makes me one of two members in the 'Fools' Experiments' book fan club - me and the author....
  
  Lerner writes here and there about the internal stuff that happens on motherboards and inside software and server infrastructure, but he does so in general terms - otherwise I wouldn't have understood what went on.
  
  Ok, the novel is uneven in pacing, for another problem.
  
  The front half of the book's plot is a touch too disconnected. It describes the progress of an Artifical Intelligence slowly gaining awareness and information in alternating chapters while a group of human characters from different areas of computer research are working peripherally, and on peripherals, doing high-tech, and some top secret, R&D research. The AI, called "the entity" (I wished after finishing the book that Lerner had called it Thing One, you know, from Dr. Seuss' book
  The Cat in the Hat), is supposedly confined to a laboratory as it goes from babyhood to an angry teen...(it's not human, so, only metaphorically speaking).
  
  Thing One is unknowingly tortured by computer scientist Dr. Arthur Jason (AJ) Rosenberg in the University Lab School as he trains it to think, at first by solving a simulated maze. AJ is also a lecturer at Smithfield University. He believes he is educating and disciplining the AI through rewards and punishments of expanding and reducing it's virtual and physical sandbox and energy (electricity) much like teaching a lab mouse. He does not believe it is self-aware, of course.
  
  Linda del Vecchio is working on her dissertation and also in AJ's lab helping to make up the maze puzzles for the AI.
  
  Doug Carey, computer scientist at BioSciCorp, Manager of the Neural Interfaces Department, is the heroic main character but I wasn't aware of that for awhile. He lost his right arm. He is working with a virtual reality racquetball game with a special helmet downloading his neural brain functions and actions into a supercomputer, and with a mechanical microprocessor-controlled prosthetic which interacts with his brain. Playing in a virtual-reality game world is the method he has been using to teach the microprocessor in his mechanical arm to respond quickly from the huge variety of brain signals. Neural nets adapt and optimize inputs and outputs, and are not actually being taught.
  
  Cheryl Stern is hired by Doug to work on neural interfacing. She works on the information the computer has recorded of Doug's virtual racquetball game, looking for patterns and connections from his physical movements and brain neurons.
  
  Colonel Glenn Adams (Ret.) works for the Inter-Agency Computer Network. It is a government military forum for defense information, collating and researching computer virus attacks. One virus in particular, called Indigo, seemed to be increasing its attacks. Antivirus programs were having a difficult time with it.
  
  The news begins to spread among these characters that the researchers in the small world of neural-interface expertise are either dying or are being sent to mental hospitals. Are computer viruses attacking their equipment and somehow hurting their brains, say, through the neural-interface helmets???
  
  Jeff Farris is a lackadaisical student at Smithfield University. His brother was a star scholar. AJ makes the mistake of assuming Jeff is similar to his hard-working brother and hires Jeff as a lab assistant. There are rules in place at the Lab School to keep the AI trapped in the lab. Of course, Jeff never reads anything, especially rules, if he can get away with it....
  
  Computers store information in simulated '0's' and '1's' using the physical magnetic properties of certain elements and minerals. It keeps track of them through virtual tables and stacks of physical bits and bytes. Some information, once stored, is marked to be kept and not ever written over, while other data can be written over as ordered by the user or Admin. The Admin is God of the internal workings of computer software, usually. If an AI is created it would be subject to whatever virtual environment the Admin let it have. In theory. What if a clever and disturbed AI figured out how to control the system-level supervisor software, a software module normally requiring permissions to act from the Admins control only?
  
  Armageddon, gentle reader. Not once, but twice. Computer programs copy themselves in backups all of the time, at different stages of computation. Oh oh. Thing Two might rise from the ashes left behind Thing One! Who would be crazy enough to continue research with a copy of an AI proven to be aggressive? Can you say, Department of Defense?
  
  Computers control everything gentle reader. Retail sales. Dams. Satellites. Traffic lights. Electrical grids. Nuclear power stations. Military missiles. Communications. Even our cars and house locks. IOTs.
  
  Yikes!
• 
  Alan

  Edward M. Lerner tricked me. His novel Fools' Experiments starts off badly, as if Lerner had decided to wrest the anti-science thriller mantle from the late
  Michael Crichton's shoulders before his winding sheets were cold. With wooden dialogue, simplistic characterizations and lots of infodumps, Fools' Experiments seems at first to be nothing more than a potboiler with an axe to grind. There was one tiny clue - the properly-placed apostrophe in the title - that Lerner could be a more careful writer than that, but at first I did not pick up on that.
  
  Only two things kept me reading. First, the writing was never worse than competent. And second, the plot involves an updated take on a theme I've enjoyed thinking and reading about for a long time - the notion of computer-generated
  artificial intelligence (artificial life, as Lerner's book would have it), as explored previously in sf classics like
  The Adolescence of P-1 and
  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, among a host of others.
  
  I did end up enjoying this book, in fact. But first I had to get through a number of annoyances...
  
  Early in, for example, so-called "eco-nuts" are set up as offstage villains, nothing but ill-informed, kneejerk reactionaries against such benign and problem-free technologies as nuclear power and genetic engineering - but, at the same time, these lunatics are also evil geniuses, capable of writing computer viruses which evolve faster than any clear-eyed, tie-sporting engineer with a security clearance can write countermeasures.
  
  Not only that, but somehow these same eco-nuts think that trashing computers wholesale will endear people to their crazy anti-nuclear cause, so they make their viruses extremely destructive as well. Silly eco-nuts! Their ideas couldn't possibly be persuasive on their own, not like the clear and righteous cause of the guys with ties, so they resort to wiping PCs in order to... display slogans. Uh-huh. That's a great way to win hearts and minds.
  
  There is a parade of cardboard antagonists seemingly pulled straight from some wingnut's blog, in fact, including the self-absorbed Hollywood types whose technical expertise and contacts turn out to be just dangerous enough to let the artificial life escape an (otherwise seamless!) electronic cordon around Los Angeles. Uh-huh.
  
  One more example - this gratuitous assertion, from p. 224:
  "Career politician that she was, she surely never envisioned the bureaucrats doing anything."
  
  Ironically, the character thinking that was a colonel in the U.S. Army - a government employee in one of the largest bureaucracies on the planet.
  
  Scientifically, as well, the early parts of the book seem rather suspect, especially when coming from someone whose expertise is in computer science. Much of the suspense involves electronic data transfer rates that don't seem to be physically possible - the entire 'predator' organism transfers itself out of a computer while it's being shut down, in less than one millisecond. Other large transfers appear to be instantaneous, or take only as long as is convenient for the plot.
  
  But eventually (by page 270, to be precise), I began to realize that Lerner was answering just about every complaint I had had about the first half of the book, at least to some extent. That page is the one on which he discusses network latency issues explicitly. And it turns out that those virus-writing "eco-nuts" were actually a more realistic couple of script kiddies in a country with lax attitudes towards destroying data - and the "no-nukes" message was just a red herring.
  
  Also, the quality of the writing went up markedly as the book went on - as if Lerner were a learner himself, like one of his evolving software entities, refining his technique on the fly.
  
  
  So... did I like it or not?
  
  On balance, yeah. I did. This is a book that misleads you in the beginning, but it provides a payoff later. I still don't think you should have to work quite this hard in order to enjoy a thriller, but... this is a work that rewards perseverance.
• 
  Cynthia

  This turned out to be a great read. It starts out a little slow, but becomes fascinating. Experiments in artificial life (AL), Neural Interface Technology (NIT) and computer viruses combine to create a perfect storm for a techno-thriller. The cast of characters is large, but realistic in the way both male and female characters are portrayed, and I appreciate that. If you are into computer programming, software development, technology, life sciences and inter-species communication, you will probably enjoy this book. It's not a literary masterpiece and is probably longer than it needs to be, but I won't forget it.
• 
  Ric

  Near future hard SF
  
  Because it exists to explore beyond human experience or knowledge, SF can tend to treat aliens more interestingly than humans. In the case of
  Fools' Experiments, the alien is a built-from-the-basics artificial life (AL), whose story of growth into maturity and self-awareness clearly dwarfs the drama of the humans who surround it. The best parts of this novel occur when the AL is on scene and exploring its cyber world. The author did not use any magic tech to construct AL and its environs, choosing to expand on known technology of the time (less than 10 years old and not so dated, except for Myspace instead of Facebook). In so doing, Mr. Lerner made the creature more accessible, perhaps even believable, at least to my impressionable mind.
  
  The human characters are tougher to relate to. Primarily scientists and hackers, and socially stunted, these struggled with their interactions, which though perhaps being realistic, hurt the flow of the narrative. Sleepwalking through the first third of the novel, I was fortunate to tune in at the right point as AL came alive and the fireworks started. From that point, the book had me hooked.
  
  This may take a little bit more investment to find the reward of a top-level SF extrapolation tale. Well worth it though. Recommended for SF fans of the "hard" variety
  
  
• 
  Peter Tillman

  Fools' Experiments is a good near-future hard-SF thriller, with decent writing and flat characters. I could never tell the male characters apart -- Jim, Glenn, Doug -- and constantly got confused about who was on deck in a particular scene.
  
  Which is too bad, but the story-line was strong enough to carry me past this traditional hard-SF failing. I'd rather have good writing and good characterization too, but I'll take one like this, where the Idea is King. Fools' Experiments is a reprise of the familiar "what-if an AI emerges and takes over cyberspace" idea, well thought out and pretty scary too. A traditional cautionary tale, and one that's likely to reach its intended audience. Who knows, Lerner's book might keep us from making the same mistakes, if AI ever does emerge. A memorable and appropriate title by a writer with a strong technical background.
  
  See Dave Truesdale's good review for the details:
  http://www.sfsite.com/columns/dave290... (scroll down). Truesdale's tastes are similar to mine, and his best-of-year recommendations there are solid.
• 
  Sean Randall

  This was alluring, because of the subject matter; it felt like a Jim Hogan work with a healthy dollop of American arrogance added for good measure. If you're a fan of AI stories, it's worth a look.
• 
  Kenneth

  Computer science fiction at its best. An artificial intelligence is loose on the internet and OMG!!!
• 
  Scott Shjefte

  Slow start. Finish leaves more to come. Life // AL will find a way around any barriers... Couple hundred pages in middle that just seemed to be circling the airport before landing.
• 
  Karina

  Humans create artificial life, and of course mess it up. I mean they do succeed in creating life (self-aware, can think independently, afraid of death), but they don't understand that, and keep treating it accordingly. Their solution when things go wrong - destroy.
  
  Both parties are at fault though, because the entity also doesn't understand us. I didn't quite understand how the entity evolved feelings, but it did, and ascribed the worst interpretations. (As an aside, the statement "It doesn't take intelligence to recognize and resent a cage" was just so obviously wrong to me - sure it takes intelligence!)
  
  The ending was satisfactory, although I wished to see more communication and more description of the turnaround - how the entity went from ascribing the worst intentions to more benign.
  
  I didn't like the last sentence in the book: "And eye for an eye ... that was a metaphor that everyone understood." Revenge is not a good idea. Preventing bad stuff from happening is all good, but not revenge. Well, at least the entity got something right:
  
  

  "Right and wrong should be clear concepts. Somehow, to Earth's teeming billions, they were not. For weeks, she had been content to observe and learn. Except--
  
  Whether humans admitted it or not, some wrongs were unambiguous and unacceptable. Tormenting others was wrong. Mass murder was wrong."
• 
  Stefan

  So-so near-future techno thriller in the Jurassic Park vein: technology X leads to beastie Y set loose on unsuspecting society. The technology in question is Artificial Life, and the monster basically a souped up version of a computer virus. "Artificial Life" means the virus, rather than being a designed program, has evolved from a basic bit of code to a sophisticated and intelligent, um, bit of code that can grow, learn, be trained, and eventually starts showing predatory behavior. The story is well-written, but unfortunately the author makes the mistake of showing the actual evolution of the beastie in too much detail, leading to many, many sections of "the entity awoke, confused about where it was... it realized it was limited to just ten percent of the nodes it was assigned before" and so on and so forth --- basically large chunks of text describing how the code evolves from a very basic problem-solving routine to the predator we all come to know and fear. It's just too much detail, and after 5 or 6 of those sections I started skip-reading them. It led me to lose interest in the story about halfway through. I did finish the novel, and found some sections of it interesting, but over all I think it just didn't work as well as it could have.
• 
  Bruce

  Well written with a good story. The IT aspects are mostly accurate. Suspension of disbelief has only a few hiccups. The worse thing about the work is a tension in the story line that seems to have no good correlation with the tempo and intensity of the story making us wonder why? I would recommend this to my IT friends and colleagues to read on holiday after a few brews but not to the general audience of science fiction readers.
• 
  Dennis

  Wow, what can I say, I rarely find a book I don't like and this one had to be it. I don't know what it was, it was hard to pinpoint for me why exactly I didn't like it. It just didn't grab me and pull me into the book. I have had several books start out slow and then just hook me, this one was slow...and kept the same pace throughout for me.
• 
  Natalie

  I enjoyed the first half, particularly the chapters from the point of view of the increasingly intelligent computer virus. Then I put it down and could not get back into the book, which seemed to becoming more plot-oriented and less idea-based. If I had maintained momentum I probably would have finished it.
• 
  Jennie

  This book was a pretty interesting story about what can happen when artificial life and computer viruses get together. It reminded me of a medical thriller gone to the computer side. The only complaint I have is it moved a little slow for me.
• 
  Andrew

  This was a very exciting techno-thriller. Really liked it and would recommend it to anyone interested in the genre; human-technology outpacing its creator, and causing havoc, perhaps gaining sentience.
• 
  Michelle

  I'm giving this a 3 1/2 stars. You need to be a techie to enjoy. A story about AI.
• 
  Bill

  A cyberpunk horror story about how stupid humans can be when it come's to acquiring power. It gets 6.5 of 10 on my scale, a fun read, but purely escapist.
• 
  Bill

  Terror in cyberspace done well.
• 
  James Cox

  This was an interesting read.