Dream of Breathing Machine

Few years back three inseparable friends sat in the same row of one sleepy classroom of Masters course in Computer Application. They generally avoided sleeping in the class, not because they liked taking notes and marking textbooks but because they found out that there are other interesting things to do than yawning and sleeping during the lectures.

Gurashis a.k.a Porthos enjoyed writing poems that would have made Edgar Alan Poe shudder in his tomb. He also used to confess that only in that classroom he feels the tomb-like claustrophobia and his ghost breaks out to fill the paper with deadly rhymes. He derived his inspiration from dark metal songs and would relentlessly talk about the fender Stratocasters, Gibson les paul, major, minor and power chord. After all, he was the best C programmer of our class.

Abhishek a.k.a Aramis used to get philosophical in the class especially when the most boring subjects were taught. He generally knew everything beforehand hence used to break the monotony with the conversations on the philosophies of yoga, the cosmic energies the pranayams and what not.

Milind a.k.a Athos, who sat in between them, filled his notebook with drawings and sketches. He enjoyed suggesting the rhymes for Porthos’s poems and discuss Eric Von Daniken with him, On the other hand, He liked discussing Mahabharat and Upnishads with Aramis.

It was an enjoyable place, full of interesting conversations. Conversation which their professors unfortunately missed out.

On that one faithful day when Porthos had not quite begun on writing his stanzas, and Aramis was not in the mood of conversation as that was the first lecture of the day and he had made sort of resolution to pay attention to this lecture, and Athos had realized that his notebook was full and there was hardly any place left to draw upon, all of them miraculously paid attention to the class. This lecture was on Operating System.

Since Athos was a newbie to the computer science, he used to fire his curious questions at Aramis and Porthos who were veterans in this field. For every question of Athos, Aramis used to give perfect textbook definitions while Porthos used to chip in for explaining the concepts in layman’s language. The ppt slide of the lecture had the heading “Operating System Kernel”

“What the hell is this Operating System Kernel?” Athos asked, to other two.

“Kernel is the fundamental part of the OS, It’s like daemon process that always runs at the core of the system in infinite loop. Whenever Operating System starts the kernel is first pulled into the memory…then it establishes communication with hardware…” when the next sentences bounced over Athos’s head, Porthos chipped in for rescue and explained him Operating System in the most simple words possible and then concluded with masterful statement “see… if you imagine computer like a body then Operating System is designed like a mind”. “Exactly!” echoed Aramis.

Athos was so impressed with this metaphor that he started witnessing the lecture with this perspective in my mind. To his amazement he was grasping concepts faster than before and all the things started fitting in nicely in the puzzle. After few minutes a sudden idea came to his mind, it was more to complete the metaphor than anything else.

“If you say Operating System is the mind of computer body then the kernel must be the breath!”

All three looked at each other; a new interesting conversation had begun!

The discussion was taken further into deeper levels by Athos and Aramis, while hanging out together. Porthos was barging in time by time lending his ears to the discussions going on. The talks went further getting converted into materialistic ideas. The ideas got noted down roughly in notebooks, diaries and even digitally in digital forms. Soon these accumulations got turned into their real passionate dream. The integration was taking form of a calculated scientific research of creating intelligence fully in control of itself. The intelligence which would truly be alive and breathing.

They peeked into whether researches with same ideas were going around. They found some with similar efforts but still vastly different from what they thought. Present researches were based on algorithms and predefined procedures trying to mimic each and every possible activity of the living organism. But all of these attempts lacked the basic understanding of a living intelligence which can be defined in a very basic sense, and still be powerful enough to create these algorithms on the fly according to the need. This basic intelligence would make its bearer alive even if it is made of wires and circuits. Journey towards creation of this entity included Contemporary Science of Aramis, Mythological Philosophies of Athos and The rocker attitude of Porthos. The definition of this intelligence became their motto and objective.

Further discussions in this blog will be based upon the extracts and the findings from their notebooks and the diaries. They will be kept in front of your observation for you to add your own views and ideas to them.

So all of you are invited to come together to join the adventure these three musketeers have begun with a dream, that is, The dream of a Breathing Machine!

All for one, One for All !