18

I'm trying to remember the name/author of a novel I read a few years ago.

The basic premise is the main character wakes up after being in hospital, to find a chunk of brain missing from a gunshot wound and a cybernetic implant being used to connect the missing synapses.

The main character was the actual developer of the tech, and during the course of the novel he gradually works out who tried to kill him and stole the tech.

The thief/attempted killer re purposed the tech as a robotic pest controller to try and patent the overall tech without being obvious it was the stolen tech.

I think the novel was written in the early 2000's.

1 Answer 1

23

The Turing Option (1992) by Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky. (isfdb entry)

The blurb below is from Fantastic Fiction:

Mind meets microchip as a brilliant young genius develops a machine capable of spontaneous thought. Before he can perfect the machine, terrorists steal his research and put a bullet through his brain. Miraculously revived by methods he pioneered, he must find his lost memory and discover who is trying to kill him.

4
  • 2
    I think it was written by AI guru Marvin Minsky (sadly deceased before singularity) and Harry Harrison tried to make it readable. As I remember there were a lot of ideas in the book that came from Minsky's "Society of Mind" approach. Did you know that Marv consulted for Kubrick's 2001? It's true! Commented Mar 29, 2020 at 11:16
  • 1
    "It was a muggy and torrid July afternoon when Brian finally got away from the computer lab. He had worked out what he hoped would be an improvement on LAMA, and AI programming language that his father had helped to develop. If he was right the cross-linking nemes of the CYC information nets could be speeded up by a factor of 10. But his new technique had to be tested and this would have taken days to work through on his own computer—so he managed to borrow some time on the Cray 5 and if all went well he should get some results by morning." Does anyone remember CYC. Or maybe even Cray? Commented Mar 29, 2020 at 11:18
  • 1
    I never got to work with a Cray, but I was familiar with the concept, including how one of the reasons they achieved the speeds they did was that the units were custom-built for a task, and they developed them with the knowledge of exactly how long the wires and circuit traces were, so that they could plan on the transmission time.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Commented Mar 29, 2020 at 14:24
  • @DavidTonhofer I Believe CYC (the ai project that intend to gather basic concepts and commun sense knowledge, as a building base for ai) is still ongoing and, to me, is not enough known (self taught ai can be scarily devoid of common sense or basic knowledges). see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 17:07

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.