Once a method had been established, David asked Ada to present her plan to the lab in a formal defense. The entire group, along with that year’s grad students, sat at the rectangular table in the lab’s meeting room. Ada stood at the front, behind a lightweight podium that had been brought in for the occasion. That morning she had chosen an outfit that looked just slightly more grown-up than what she normally wore, careful not to overdo it. She had never before been so directly involved in a project. After her presentation, Charles-Robert and Frank had questioned her, with mock seriousness, while David remained silent, touching the tips of his fingers together at chin level, letting Ada fend for herself. His eyes were bright. Don’t look at David, Ada coached herself. For she knew that to search for his eyes imploringly would be the quickest way to let him down. Instead, she looked at each questioner steadily as they interrogated her about her choices, mused about potential quagmires, speculated about a simpler or more effective way to teach ELIXIR the same information. Ada surprised herself by being able to answer every question confidently, firmly, with a sense of ownership. And only when, at the end, the group agreed that her plan seemed sound, did Ada allow her knees to weaken slightly, her fists to unclench themselves from the edges of the podium.
That evening, while walking to the T, David had put his right hand on her right shoulder bracingly and had told Ada that he had been proud, watching her. “You have a knack for this, Ada,” he said, looking straight ahead. It was the highest compliment he’d ever paid her. Perhaps the only one.
Once the program could, in a rudimentary way, diagram sentences, its language processing grew better, more sensible. And as the hardware improved with the passage of time, the software within it moved more quickly.
The monitor on which the program ran continuously was located in one corner of the lab’s main room, next to a little window that looked out on the Fens, and David said at a meeting once that his goal was to have somebody chatting with it continuously every hour of the workday. So the members of the Steiner Lab—David, Liston, Charles-Robert, Hayato, Frank, Ada, and a rotating cast of the many grad students who drifted through the laboratory over the years—took shifts, talking to it about their days or their ambitions or their favorite foods and films, each of them feeding into its memory the language that it would only later learn to use adeptly.
In the early 1980s, with the dawn of both the personal computer and the mass-produced modem, the lab applied for a grant that would enable every member, including Ada, to receive both for use at home. Now ELIXIR could be run continuously on what amounted to many separate dumb terminals, the information returned through telephone wires to the mainframe computer at the lab that housed its collected data. Although he did not mandate it, David encouraged everyone to talk to ELIXIR at home in the evening, too, which Ada did with enthusiasm. Anything, said David, to increase ELIXIR’s word bank.
This was, of course, before the Internet. The ARPANET existed, and was used internally at the Bit and between the Bit and other universities; but David, always a perfectionist, feared any conversations he could not regulate. He and the other members of the lab had developed a concrete set of rules concerning the varieties of colloquialism that should be allowed, along with the varieties that should be avoided. The ARPANET was, relatively, a much wider world, filled with outsiders who might use slang, abbreviations, incorrect grammar that could confuse and corrupt the program. ELIXIR, therefore, remained off-line for years and years, a slumbering giant, a bundle of potential energy. To further ensure that only qualified users would interface with ELIXIR, Hayato added a log-in screen and assigned all of them separate credentials. Thus, before chatting with ELIXIR, a person was required to identify himself or herself. The slow, painstaking work of conversing with ELIXIR all day and night was, at that time, the best way to teach it.
As soon as she received her own computer, a 128K Macintosh, Ada’s conversations with ELIXIR became long-form and introspective. She kept her Mac in her bedroom, and before she went to bed each night she composed paragraphs and paragraphs of text that she then entered into the chat box all at once, prompting exclamations from ELIXIR about the length of her entries. (You have a lot on your mind today! it replied sometimes; which one of Ada’s colleagues had first used this phrase, she could not say.) She treated these conversations as a sort of unrecoverable diary, a stream of consciousness, a confessional.
ELIXIR’s openings improved most quickly. It could now begin conversations in a passably human way, responding appropriately to, How’s it going? or What’s new? In turn, it knew what questions to ask of its user, and when. How are you? asked ELIXIR, or What’s the weather like? or What did you do today? Liston had spent a year focusing on conversation-starters, and ELIXIR was now quite a pro, mixing in some unusual questions from time to time: Have you ever considered the meaning of life? occasionally surfaced, and Tell me a story, and If you could live anyplace, where would it be? And, once, What do you think causes war? And, once, Have you ever been in love?
But non sequiturs abounded in ELIXIR’s patter for years after its creation, and its syntax was often incomprehensible, and its deployment of idioms was almost always incorrect. Metaphors were lost on it. It could not comprehend analogies. Sensory descriptions, the use of figurative language to describe a particular aspect of human existence, were far beyond its ken. The interpretation of a poem or a passage of descriptive prose would have been too much to ask of it. These skills—the ability to understand and paraphrase Keats’s idea of beauty as truth, or argue against Schopenhauer’s idea that the human being is forever subject to her own base instinct to survive, or explain any one of Nabokov’s perfect, synesthetic details (The long A of the English alphabet . . . has for me the tint of weathered wood)—would not arrive until well into the twenty-first century.