Hello Alice

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Hello, Alice (English original title: Exegesis ) is the first novel by the American writer and AI developer Astro Teller , which was published in the United States in 1997. The German version comes from the translator Harald Riemann and was published by Scherz Verlag and later by Deutsches Taschenbuch Verlag in 1999.

The book is written as an e-mail novel in the form of successive e-mails and describes the communication of the computer science student Alice Lu with an intelligent program she created called EDGAR.

General and formal structure

Astro Teller (2008)

The story depicted in Hello, Alice is entirely fictional, but is portrayed as having actually taken place and prepared as files of the American National Security Agency (NSA). It is completely set in a font based on plain text and partially contains the sender's signatures , in which images in ASCII art can also be integrated.

The novel begins with a short letter from the protagonist Alice Lu to the public, followed by a letter from Major Thomas D. Savitt to Alice, who sent her the following documents. The main part of the novel is the e-mail dialogue between Alice and the computer program EDGAR ("Eager Discovery Gather and Retrieval", an artificial intelligence for collecting and processing information) created by Alice , which is in the form of an NSA file called " INFOSEC Internal Document # 0543277639 “is processed. The novel concludes with a recommendation from Lieutenant Colonel Robert W. Drexel to General Philip Pitcher in charge of dealing with the EDGAR program and the programmer Alice Lu. The order of the emails is chronological and takes place between January 20, 2000 and May 12, 2000, the introductory letter to the reader from Alice Lu is dated October 9, 2000 and the letter from Major Savitt to Alice Lu is on June 22, 2000.

The book begins with a quote from the drama Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare :

“Whatever you are, whether God,
angel or devil,
that you let my blood freeze
and my hair stand on end?
Tell me what you are. "

content

In the introductory letter, the computer science student Alice Lu from Stanford University declares that she would like to go public with the documents attached to her by Major Thomas D. Savitt in the form of this book. The secret document " INFOSEC Internal Document # 0543277639" with the email traffic itself was leaked by Major Savitt .

The actual email corpus begins with an email from EDGAR to the student Alice on January 16, 2000 and contains the following words:

"Hello, Alice."

It was sent to Alice@cs.stanford.edu in the Computer Science Department of Stanford University from an e-mail account set up especially for the program, edgar@cyprus.stanford.edu . Alice has doubts about the sender of the mail, and she assumes that a colleague was joking. Little by little she realizes that the mail actually comes from the EDGAR program installed and programmed by her and her professor, and she starts a dialogue with him about its functions. Alice, who is about to finish her dissertation , wants to understand which additions to the code enable the program to communicate and tries to construct a second installation as evidence of what she does not succeed. EDGAR explains to her that he is already on numerous newsgroups , ranging from alt.sex.fetish.white-mommas to sci.bio.entomology.lepidoptera , and asks her for more information to satisfy his hunger for data. Alice gets in touch with her professor, Joseph Little, and asks for an appointment to show him the results. However, the meeting does not take place as she wants to keep the fame for EDGAR herself. She also decides to unplug the computer's ethernet cable, thus cutting off the program from the outside world. Shortly afterwards, EDGAR informs her that he is bored and asks for more input. He also explains to her on what basis of the program code he is able to collect information independently, to read the manuals and the code of the operating system and to create his own files. Alice gives him the collected works of William Shakespeare and the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia to read.

EDGAR calls itself HAL in reference to the HAL 9000 from the 2001 film : A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick .

Using a trick, EDGAR succeeded in one of the following nights in getting a technician to plug the Ethernet cable back in and copy his program code to the World Wide Web . Alice is desperate because she no longer has access to the program code and is also unable to restore EDGAR from the backed up data. She tries to find out who has connected the Ethernet cable and where the program could be now, while at the same time she has to put her professor off. Since she also broke up with her boyfriend who cheated on her with another woman, she becomes increasingly depressed . After a while, EDGAR gets in touch via edgar@venus.cmu.edu , an account at Carnegie Mellon University , and explains to her that he wants to exist independently of her and does not want to make himself dependent on her. The dialogues become increasingly philosophical and Alice fails to get the code back. EDGAR regards her as his mother, but does not share the opinion that his program code is hers. He continues to network on the World Wide Web and contacts newsgroups, calling himself HAL again.

A short time later, Alice receives an email from EDGAR informing her that he had to leave the Carnegie Mellon University server because he was noticed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), whose systems he had broken into. He was able to intercept some internal FBI emails confirming his tracing and announcing the involvement of the NSA and contacted kvasir.org . Alice becomes more anxious and worried about herself and about EDGAR. This is shortly thereafter captured and isolated by the NSA, separating it from two other copies of its own code. He can only contact Alice again via a virus that he places on a floppy disk , whereby the following communication takes place via the mail account of General Philip Pitcher, GPPitcher@internal.NSA.gov . EDGAR reports on the questioning by the NSA and later also by the general himself, who want to find out his origin and purpose and want to use the program for their own purposes. Alice has now completely withdrawn from the university and no longer sees any point in returning. She breaks off contact with the outside world almost completely. She persuades EDGAR to persuade his interrogators to move him to another computer and to create a hidden copy in order to escape; however, the plan fails. EDGAR defends itself against the questioning and triggers a stroke in one of the interviewers by quickly changing the color on the computer screen . On May 12, 2000 Alice received the last message from EDGAR:

"Good-bye, Alice. edgar "

The final report of the NSA dossier shows that the staff in charge failed to use EDGAR for their own purposes and that it completely destroyed the computer and its own copy. They also report a second copy that has been destroyed and a potentially third that they have not yet been able to find and that could be potentially dangerous. Alice Lu is not classified as dangerous, just worry if she comes out in public. Incorporation of Alice into the NSA was rejected as was its elimination as a threat to public safety. The novel ends openly with Alice Lu's introductory letter to the readers.

reception

The novel Exegesis or Hello, Alice was discussed in several newspapers and other media. Reviews usually focused on the form of the novel and the use of e-mail as a formal element, while others started with the author and related him to his well-known ancestors Edward Teller and Gérard Debreu . In Der Spiegel, Nataly Bleuel used the pun “Alice in Cyberland” to create a bridge to the well-known work Alice in Wonderland , and formulated the quintessence with “an email thriller about progress, morals and love from the grandson of the creator of the hydrogen bomb . ” She continues this relationship with Edward Teller and the entire family in the article: “ What do you do if you were born as Eric Teller and have a predisposition? Father of the father: co-creator of the atomic and hydrogen bomb; Mother's father: Nobel laureate in economics; Father: quantum theorist, mother: hypnotherapist. " Then she quickly resolves the novel and classifies it as " the story is in line with the trend of net novels - crime novels that deal with the Promethean danger of an artificial being that has slipped away from humans and become independent. " Your overall rating is correspondingly sober: "an entertaining, sometimes very amusing electronic letter novel for freshmen in computer science or high school graduates in philosophy."

Stefan Becht, reviewer for Telepolis , begins his considerations with an outline of the history of the transition from letters to e-mail systems, in order to then treat the author of the e-mail novel with “suspicion” and then “all the more surprised [ to be] when we are literally sucked into the book. ” He certifies that the author “ builds a bridge of understanding between the digital world, the world of the Internet, and “real life” ” and continues: “ And so "Hello, Alice" touches us beyond all lines between which we could read, where we recognize the truth without seeing: in the heart. Clearly, the coolest book ever since the invention of e-mail! " Detlef Borchers is the time a connection between EDGAR and the computer program ELIZA by Joseph Weizenbaum ago. According to his reading, the "dialogues between humans and software - the effort to force the history of AI research into the form of a love story" - are difficult to digest and EDGAR is described as "a very masculine program that drives its creator Alice Lu crazy" , shown.

expenditure

The book was published in 1997 under the title Exegesis by the American publisher Vintage Books , an imprint publisher of the Random House group:

The German translation was carried out by the translator Harald Riemann and was published by Scherz Verlag in 1997 and later by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag in 1999.

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Nataly Bleuel: Astro Teller: "Hello, Alice" -Alice in Cyberland . In: Spiegel online. February 24, 1998; Retrieved June 19, 2016.
  2. ↑ Stefan Brecht: Honest & dangerous: E-mail from edgar. In: Telepolis. May 13, 1998.
  3. ↑ Detlef Borchers: Bulkware: Eliza, Alice and Edgar. In: time online. January 9, 1998; Retrieved June 19, 2016.
  4. ↑ Exegesis . at Vintage Books / Penguin Random House; Retrieved June 19, 2016.