R. J. Brown2
Once upon a time there was a famous cheese factory in an obscure region of the south part of France. They made the finest Brie in the entire world. They attributed the exceptional quality of their cheese to the skill and diligence of the old ``Father Cheese'' who presided over the quality assurance department in the out-going inspection section of the plant. This refined old gentleman had learned his skill at grading cheeses from his father. He was the first born son of a first born son, had lived in the same house as his father and his father's fathers before that. That house was the old farm house on the grounds of the cheese plant. It dated back into the dim and dark distant past before anybody could remember.
Guiome, as was his name, had rather long, off-white, somewhat stringy hair and a long but rather thin beard of a similar color. He wore a slightly crumpled black suit, an old black top hat, brown shoes with black spats, and carried an ancient hand rubbed cane made of fine imported ebony inlaid with iridescent mother of pearl, and topped with a carved ``ivory'' ball that was in reality an old discarded plastic billiard ball carved with a Dremel moto-tool by his now disceased mother-in-law. (He clubbed her to death with it in order to gain possession of it, but no one was cognizant of this hidden fact.)
Guiome ruled the entire plant, its grounds, and the little hamlet adjacent to it with a malleable soft iron fist. It still hurt if you got hit with it though. He wielded absolute power over whether any particular cheese was up to the standards of the factory, and every one accepted his judgement in such matters without question. If more than ten cheeses were rejected in any seven hour shift, all twelve department heads were called in for a crisis meeting. It was called a crisis meeting because it was always a crisis meeting Guiome. He was arrogant and despicable when it came to matters of quality control. He would always replace one of the twelve with some totally inexperienced new hire off the production floor. Twenty four hours later, if the situation had still not improved, he would go into the pump room and blow the dust off the float switch contacts and hope that would set things straight.
He kept meaning to tell his secret-ary to take a memo wherein he would dictate his thoughts on how general facilities maintenance was crucial to maintaining good standards, but somehow it always got misinterpreted that he wanted the grass cut, or the flower beds weeded. It was indeed a hilarious sight watching Bill, the gardener, carefully brushing the snow aside with his mittened hand to pull the weeds out of the frozen garden as the clock chimed thirteen times on one bright midnight when the temperature had fallen to 0oK shortly after Guiome had cast a chill by issuing the same zero maintenance memo for the 5.xx×1019 time.
I give all this detail to provide background for understanding the monumental nature of the task facing our hero, Willie May Jones, a post doctoral fellow at the Zulu Institute of Technology (ZIT). She was a haggard middle aged woman who had struggled all her life to get an education. Just as it seemed almost hopeless, the new and exciting field of Knowledge Engineering sprung upon the scene. She dutifully collected and mailed in her cereal box tops to get a chance at the aptitude test that would qualify her for the only scholarship of its kind: a complete tuition refund from the state operated university system that was repayable upon completion of her first work assignment successfully.
She breezed through the test, went off to darkest Africa, and studied hard. Six years later, she emerged as the first human person to receive any sort of degree at all from a cereal manufacturer. This qualified her perfectly to meet Guiome!
Willie May was whisked away in a surplus Goodyear blimp to land 5 days later in the south central part of the cheese plant's cattle grazing pasture. She promptly introduced herself to the financial backers of the cheese factory. They told her this disturbing tale.
It seems that Guiome was getting old. He still had absolute perfection with regards to judging cheeses, but the doctors had indicated that he would not live forever, and that, since he was childless, they had better be thinking about his replacement. It was decided that with the perfection of automata and expert systems in recent times, it would be preferable to have Guiome's abilities available 24 hours a day instead of just seven. His mirror image in an expert system would always be on the job, and it would not cause all of the personality conflicts that the old buzzard brought on.
So Ms. Jones was chosen to be the chief KE on the project. What a thrill! If she could pull this one off, she would owe thousands of dollars in back tuition, but who cared about that? Her only goal in life was to succeed. She would study the old maestro in every detail. After all, she'd had years of training by some of the best in the group, so she stood a fairly good chance of pleasing the investors and getting paid.
Ms. Jones stood beside Guiome that first day and watched a strange and ancient ritual that was to become routine before the years were over. She was standing at his left side while he raised his right hand high over his head, extended his index finger and pointed in the direction of Polaris, exhaled, and plunged his finger towards the nadir, deep into the cheese that was just then coming down the conveyor. ``Ah oui, ces't magnifique!'' he whispered just under his breath as he slowly shook his head from side to side. Beside him, Ms. Jones mumbled ``Huh?'' inaudibly. She was too busy taking notes to ask any questions now. The questions would come later, after the crucial data was analyzed.
After a week of this, a shift passed in which the pass/fail ratio was intolerable; that is to say, seven cheeses failed in a ten hour time period. Guiome explained to Ms. Jones that it was time to call a crisis meeting. She had heard about these from the ladies in the rest room. You could always count on two or three women in the ladies room, even on the graveyard shift. One of them was always the same. She trembled involuntarily a little on the way there now. Suddenly she needed a smoke.
While she was out, Guiome turned slowly around and wandered off. No one saw him again until he walked into the meeting just as it was ending. He said, ``It wasn't important anyway--I just blew the dust off...''
The next day, Ms. Jones had gathered enough raw knowledge, in the form of copious notes and diagrams, to start her analysis. She began this by flying to Paris and climbing the Eiffel Tower on her knees to gain the proper perspective. Then she holed up in a fine hotel and had caviar and coke sent up via room service. She never drank a drop. The coke went flat. Her toilet paper rolled off the sink and fell in the Commode 64 feet away, along with all of her notes.
``Oh well,'' she thought, ``I'll just have to wing it.'' And wing it she did. She had a photographic memory, but the camera was loaded with black and white film, and she had been using an elaborate color coding scheme to keep topics separated. After hours of listening to the same cut of ``Red, Black, and Green'' by Pharaoh Sanders, she thought she had it all worked out.
``Every Good Boy Does Fine,'' she thought. She consulted one of her most brilliant algorithms in HairLip, a point focused programming dialect based on COOPS: ' BK BN RD OR YL GN BU VI GY WT ` ``I know there's a connection in there somewhere, if I can just find it...'' The words kept rolling over and under and to and fro and dup and drop and swap, as she powdered her face. Wait a minute! That's it! SWAP! Why didn't I see it before? It's really obvious when you look at it the right way. I'll just swap places with GUIOME and see for myself what it's like. Then HE can tell me what i`m doing wrong! It's gotta work. It's brilliant!
She immediately went to a second hand shop and and purchased an exact copy of Guiomes garb, made of finest cotton, hand picked. She couldn't find any ivory crowned canes, however, so she had to settle for white plastic inlays with a mini-pearl tip. She also forgot and left the price tag on her hat.
She returned to the cheese factory the next day and traded places with Guiome. He thought it was a great idea: he needed a day off anyhow. Just in case she should miss a bad cheese, though, he stood behind her and loomed over her in the shadows of the hall next to the conveyor. What with the old stone walls and everything, his breathing echoed and reverberated, but never went very far from Ms. Jones. Once he even snatched one off the belt after she had made the ritualistic plunge but failed to recognize that it was a reject. ``HA! YOU MISSED ONE! Hee hee hee haa haw har ho hough hoo foo bar (plugh),'' and he dissolved into a paroxysm of laughter and melted into a puddle onto the floor that evaporateed and later recondensed as her tears; she sobbed softly over her first failure. ``i, i ... i'm really very sorry, your horror, but it looked ok to me. what i mean is, you know...'' `NO! UNDER KNOW CIRCUMSTANCES ARE YOU TO PERMIT ANY SUCH THING TO EVER HAPPEN AGAIN INSIDE THE KNOWN PHYSICAL UNIVERSE!'
kNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING IS INDEED A VERY DIFFICULT ART. Ms. JOnes filed for reinforcements.
The next Monday Morning, a tribe of twelve seasoned veterans from MIT, KEE, and other such pedigrees fell on their knees and worshiped ``Big BLUE'' before catching planes and trains from all over the world to congregate and converge upon the little cheese kitchen.
When they arrived, they approached the problem from a much more scientific point of view. They attached six axis strain gauges to the surface of the cheese, or rind, as it is properly called. They mounted multiple accelerometers on the ring finger of Guiome. They used stroboscopic flash and stop action video tape to study every motion of the old Geezer in greatest detail. They monitored his heartbeat, respiration, electroencephalogram, and galvanic skin response.
With the help of the SOS statistical package running on the best supercomputers in the world, they reduced this myriad of detail to get the final answer. They took Coriolis effect into account. They were careful to correlate any results with the phase of the moon and the ascension of Jupiter. Groundhog day was even observed with a High Holy Feast. The pH of the old man's skin was measured hourly. In the end, they had calculated the Lyaponov exponent of the whole chaotic system to be exactly 19! The answer was simple! Build a robot!
So they built a robot, with a stainless steel hand, and a middle finger made of finest ivory. They used hydraulic servos with LVDT shaft angle encoders at all the revolute joints, but to capture that final nuance of motion, a 220 VAC 3 Ph 50 Hz solenoid in a prismatic configuration was attached to the critical finger. At its tip was a precious black pearl! The kinematic equations were carefully formulated and the Jacobian extracted in closed form by the symbolic math program written by Maxine Esmeralda, known as just MAXEMA for short. This solved the dynamics of the system.
The rest is history. After 11 years in the making, the expert system, now known affectionately as BIG-G was ready for unveiling. No one can really tell just how many people have worked on any project of this magnitude, so we have concentrated on the key players. The sheet was removed, and there stood Guiome, ready to throw the switch and activate BIG-G. Amidst fanfares of trumpets and cryings of babies, he slowly pulled the switch down. It sputtered ever so slightly as the 3 phases engaged Just-Out-Of-Time, so he opened it up again and gently puffed across the contacts, then looked up in the direction of Polaris and plunged the lever in a perfect semicircular arc.
As the blades of the 3 pronged knife switch synchronously engaged, a speck of sludge entered the fuel injector of cylinder number 4 in the diesel engine driving the generating plant in town, causing it to clog, and the device missed a beat as a wisp of white smoke wafted in the calm air, but then it cleared and continued to run.
The old man passed that winter, and the quality of the plant began to deteriorate. The investors were disapointed, but, as is the case with all good investors, they had an alternate plan. They would have to convert the Brie factory over to the manufacture of yogurt, a mediocre quality product with great mass appeal. Why, they would make millions! ``We should have done this long ago, George!''
A food process technologist was flown in from Cincinnati, Ohio, U. S. A. to size up the situation and determine what changes would have to be made in order to convert the plant. He toured the facility and admired the beautiful grounds, observing the neatly swept sidewalks and freshly mown grass. He was especially fond of the old farm house. He himself was in the process of renovating an old home on the Ohio in Kentucky.
When he watched the futile robot in action, he commented to the aide at his side, ``Gee, that's neat.'' But as the fickle finger perforated the Rhine, the caustic fumes of NH3 percolated up his nostrils. ``How can anybody eat that stuff? It smells just like horse piss!'' Jane commented that it didn't smell that way when everything was working right, and that was supposed to be the very reason why he was here.
SO... he called in the chemical engineers, and they recommended various and sundry methods of altering the ammonia concentration in the product. ``But we're supposed to start making yogurt next week,'' Jane protested. ``Shut up J. J., can't you see I'm busy trying to save this whole wretched mess single handedly?''
Then he had sensors installed and thoroughly overhauled and cleaned up the entire system. He was particularly perplexed as to how the process functioned at all when he discovered a blackened and charred set of contact points on a float switch in the pump room, but not having a replacement set available, he burnished them with a special diamond dust coated feeler gauge designed just for the refurbishing of bimetalic contacts. ``That should keep y'all happy for another hundred years or so,'' he thought proudly to himself.
Today, the plant is again turning out the finest Brie cheeses in the entire world. But last night, a drunk maintenance worker spilled beer on a float switch in the pump room. ``I hope nobody saw that,'' he mumbled to himself.
AUTHOR'S REMARKS: This story deliberately commits the usage error of sylleptic ambiguity in numerous places. Phrases are used twice with entirely different meanings the second time. The thought patterns of the characters, and indeed the whole situation, are faulty. Even worse, semantic drift occurs as the key people arrive and are replaced, so that the problem being solved is never really understood--nothing is definite. I consider this a characteristic of any large project, since people come and people go, but the project goes on.
I wrote this in about 45 minutes at 2 AM after being up almost 48 hours working on some difficult algorithms (in FORTH no less!). After I got them to work, I needed to unwind before going to bed.
While the paragraph beginning, ``kNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING IS INDEED A VERY DIFFICULT ART'' was an accident with the CAPS-LOCK key, I thought it added a rather nice effect, so I left it that way. The backwards single quotes in ' BK BN RD OR YL GN BU VI GY WT ` were deliberate from the beginning.
The whole story is putrid with puns, mostly technological ones. How many could you find?
