ArchivedLogs:Heuristics

Heuristics
Dramatis Personae Sebastian, Doug, Peter
In Absentia	2014-03-12 '
Location <NYC> Stark Tower - Midtown East
A gleaming beacon of modern architecture shining bright amidst the industry of Midtown, Stark Tower serves as headquarters to one of the largest tech corporations in the world. The offices and boardrooms of Stark Industries and any number of satellite companies, subsidiaries, and nonprofits are homed here. To the public what draws most visitors is not the business but the science -- the first two floors of the building hold an extensive museum dedicated to technological innovation. As well, guided tours three days a week are open to the public, to be shown through both the museum and, more notably, through (select parts of) the dozen floors dedicated solely to R&D.The building itself is as eye-catching inside as outside. The soaring lobby atrium extends upwards, bright and glass-walled with perpetually bustling balconies ringing each floor. All visitors must pass through the lobby security checkpoints to be signed in. The technology integrated into the building, from the interactive holographic displays that help guide visitors to their destination to the quiet AI that remembers visitors' preferences upon repeat visits to the basement arc reactor that powers the entire building, are quiet reminders of the company's dedication to innovation. The R&D floors at Stark Industries are a researcher's wet dream, a veritable playground of new technology and workshop tools and brilliant minds to consult during work. But playground or no it's still a place where everyone is expected to work Pretty Hard, which Sebastian -- /usually/ does, honest. At first blush it's hard to even tell he's /not/ working, now, huddled in at his usual workstation at one end of the space given to /his/ team, dark eyes very intently scrutinizing a holo-image of a motor that hangs in midair, checking it against notes on the tablet-screen in front of him. Not, admittedly, any motor to do with the car his team is working on but who's counting? In appearance he still looks -- /radically/ unlike Sebastian, no longer tiny and blue and sharky but a middling-tall curly-haired brown-skinned female, dressed colorful and bright in a blue knee-length skirt patterned like the TARDIS, leggings underneath (one leg black, one leg purple), a black sleeveless top with long purple sleeves attached to it by safety pins, chunky platform ankle boots. There has been -- /more/ than a little awkward-discomfort around his team since this overnight transformation, kept largely in tense check only be the fact that, well, he is their boss. What might not be helping the awkward discomfort is the fact that Peter still insists on calling Sebastian 'Sharkboss'. In fact, right at this very moment, Peter is /sneaking/ up on Sebastian -- from overhead! -- clad in a blue collar shirt (buttoned up, sleeves rolled up -- exposing his chitin-clad forearms) with a little navy blue bow-tie (borrowed from Shane!) and black dress slacks -- clinging to the ceiling with a white piece of paper that claims 'SHARKBOSS' dangling from his mouth, several pieces of tape attached. Apparently, now that Sebastian doesn't have super-scent, this is the perfect time for which to attach the appropriate label to, well -- his SHARKBOSS. Doug subscribes whole-heartedly to the working Pretty Hard part of Stark. He's generally good for helping in any capacity his team needs, whether it's getting food for the group or running through endless lines of programming to find the single bad command. Which might be what he's doing now. Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved blue t-shirt with the Thundercats logo on the chest, he's sitting at the same table as, but not particularly near, Sebastian. It doesn't seem to be out of any discomfort with his boss' new appearance; it seems to be a space-related thing as he has a couple of tablets set out next to the holo-computer /he's/ working at. Doug's working pretty intently. His eyes look almost glazed over as his fingers swipe through screens filled with data. Only occasionally does he look away to drop one hand and skim his fingers over one of the tablets. "Mmm." is sudden, and Doug's brow twitches, as he shifts his chin to address Sebastian without moving his eyes. "Simulations still show that four-way stop bug, right?" With his newer duller senses Sebastian doesn't notice the sneaking, just paying very intent attention to his current project. He only glances up and over -- at Doug, not at the spider poised to attack him from above -- when he is addressed, a sudden flush of color in his cheeks as he swats at whatever he's been working on to minimize it. Bring up notes on their actual project instead, opening up a browser window to page through outstanding bug tickets. "Mmhmm," he answers, after a minute, and then adds with a tiny laugh: "Our cars aren't /assertive/ enough. Maybe I should get Shane to teach them manners instead. Do you think maybe I accidentally wrote myself into car-form? I'd wait /forever/ at a stop sign." And then -- just as Sebastian swats at the screen and gives that tiny laugh -- SWOOP! Down Peter descends, hopping to the floor with scarcely more than a rustle of his feet (clad only in socks; funny two-toe'd ones!) bringing his hand down to give Sebastian a friendly pat-pat-pat -- SHARKBOSS now firmly stuck to his back! Written in dark black marker, with a chompy cartoonish shark drawn underneath it, just so everyone fully understands. "--I don't even have a driver's license," Peter admits, before adding: "Wait, does that mean I'm not allowed to write these programs? I'm not even allowed to drive a car, how can I /program/ one to drive?" He peers over B's shoulder, having gotten a tiny glimpse of -- an engine? /Something/. "What were you working on, by the way?" he asks, in his rather clueless, heavy-handed way -- not even realizing Sebastian was trying to /hide/ it. Doug doesn't seem to notice the flush, intent on the information in front of him. He also fails to notice the ninja-soft dropping of Peter. "Hah," he says in answer to Sebastian's question. "There's worse things than cars with manners. New York is /begging/ for these." When Peter speaks, the blond blinks and rocks back on his stool, blinking suddenly in the teenager's direction. It takes a minute for him to parse what the spidery youth is saying, and then he wrinkles his nose. "I'm pretty sure if you can program a racing game, you can program an actual car," he says, offering a grin before he looks back at his hovering screen. "I can't build a wall, but I can write a program that tells a robotic arm how to do it." He lifts a shoulder, glancing over curiously when Peter asks his question. "You working on something new?" "Oh, I'm -- I wasn't working on --" Sebastian's blush deepens, his head dipping. "It was nothing, it was just kind of a -- a side, um." He rubs at the side of his neck habitually, despite there being no gills left there to soothe. Doug's statement earns a puzzled frown, a slightly awkward-quiet laugh: "I don't -- think programming a racing game really carries over into -- a real life situation is so infinitely more complex I'm not even sure the relevant skillsets would be the same at /all/ given all the different variables you'd need to --" He tips his head upward, looking almost helplessly at Peter -- for backup? Clarification? Somewhere behind him someone snickers at the SHARKBOSS sign; Sebastian's ears just burn darker and he drops his hand automatically from his neck, hunching a little further at his workstation. "More polite streets would definitely be a plus though. -- I'm not allowed to drive, either," he adds with a crooked grin. "But that doesn't mean I can't read up on the rules of the road." "Racing games," Peter helpfully translates for Doug, "only go in one direction." At the sound of a snicker somewhere in the background, Peter cocks his head back over a shoulder, frowning -- and then -- very quietly, very sneakily! -- snaps up the sign from Sebastian's back and crumples it up. WELL. If /other/ people are going to laugh...! He tosses the ball of paper into a nearby trashcan, clucking his tongue as he does. "What's the side project?" Peter asks, before promptly plucking up a tablet on a nearby desk (his own!), shoving his foot against the wall beside the desk, and proceeding to -- walk /up/ it, back up on the ceiling, even as he swipes away some of the junk and returns to the /incredibly/ boring job he was up to before attempting to give Sebastian an appropriate label. MORE RESEARCH. "Road rules are boring. Oh my God, did you know you have to be like ten bazillion yards away from a school bus while it's moving? Ten bazillion. That's the /exact/ number it says right here," Peter says, tapping his tablet as he dangles upside down. Doug lifts a shoulder at Sebastian's correction and Peter's subsequent translation. "Sure, it's more complicated," he says, color creeping into his ears. "But the overall idea is more or less the same." He falls silent, offering a dark look in the direction of the snicker. "Just one side project?" he asks, lifting his eyebrows. "Or just a /new/ one?" He grins, and leans back on his stool to track Peter as he walks across the ceiling to his workstation. He grins at the assessment of road rules, and runs his fingers along the edges of a data window, making a closing gesture to minimize it before he opens another with a jazz hand gesture. "There's a good driving school in Westchester," he notes. "That's where I learned. I don't remember the number ten bazillion, though." He wrinkles his nose. "Wouldn't that put you around the world several.../thousand/ times?" "Well -- but it's not even the same /idea/, in a racing game you don't have any /unpredictable/ input which is -- I mean, the problem of dealing with /entirely/ unknown variables is kind of the hugest /difficulty/ in --" Sebastian cuts off with a deeper blush and a dip of his head, glancing up at the dark look as Peter removes the sign and crumples it. "-- Huh?" He watches the tossed ball with a confused look. He shakes his head as if to clear it, curls bobbing around his face. "... I have a lot of side projects," he admits bashfully. "But this one's, um. Pretty. Silly. -- I think Peter's wrong," he adds seriously to Doug. "It was /seventeen/ bazillion yards. I read the book too." "Silly? I like silly," Peter admits, his eyes glued to the tablet as he continues to -- swipe! Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Flipping through the pages of what is likely a book on various road rules and regulations. "You do realize," Peter comments as he reads, "that we're probably going to have to program the thing to actually occasionally /break/ road laws? I mean there is no way any driver can seriously follow every single regulation to the letter and still be functional. Oh my God, we're going to program /outlaw/ cars," and at this, Peter does look up, apparently excited at the idea. "Like, it could be settings. 'My Aunt', 'Normal Driver', 'Dukes of Hazard'." "B. Relax." Doug grins, one side of his mouth tilting upwards. "I'm just yanking your chain. You really think that I think what we're doing is the same as Mario Kart?" He winks, and moves back to his computer. "I've actually been thinking about that," he says to Peter. "As well as that four-way stop bug." He wrinkles his nose, and drops a hand to swipe at his tablet, sending the information there to the holo display. "I think that there are elements of the WARLOCK program that could be modified for this kind of thing. His ability to learn, for example." A few swipes through the code. "Then the cars might be able to assess situations and make actual decisions, instead of choosing from preset files." The blond scratches at his face, and highlights the lines of code, copying them to another window and flinging the resultant file to Sebastian's screen, and then Peter's. "The idea's still rough but tell me what you think." "I /like/ Mario Kart," Peter responds with just a hint of indignation -- as if that's /precisely/ what he thought they were doing here! Maybe it is, actually. Maybe that's the whole reason he decided to join! "I -- oh hello there is code here," Peter responds, peering at the code that -- appears on his screen! "Oh uhm -- I mean -- uh like I'd have to... read a lot of this stuff to understand what it's doing," he admits, his cheeks brightening with just a hint of violet! "--but I dunno if we want the cars making /actual/ decisions based on data they collect themselves, like -- that could end up being /dangerous/. It might be cool to build the heuristics the cars use from something like that, and review it ourselves, then implement it -- but the cars shouldn't change the heuristics they use themselves, just cuz -- they might screw it up, and we'd never know until something went wrong." And then, as he peers closer at the tablet and code, he soon adds! "--why is it called Warlock? Is it, like, /witchcraft/ or something?" "Oh -- oh. I don't -- ever know," Sebastian admits with a small wrinkle of his nose, a sheepish duck of head. "I'm bad at, um, sarcasm -- wait, /you're/ joking too, right?" Now he just looks confused, mouthing, 'Dukes of Hazard?' to Doug with a wide-eyed oh-god-help look before he starts explaining (patiently) to Peter: "I don't think it's really a great idea to give our cars driving /personalities/, they should -- oh." His cheeks are /furious/ red when he snaps his mouth shut again, perhaps /accepting/ the fact that EVERYONE is just yanking his chain today. His fingers curl up into his hair, leaving his dark curls a little bit frizzier than before. "Learning -- mmm." He sounds distracted, eyes shifting to start looking through the code that his screen catches. "Yeah, /actual/ learning /on/ the road would get -- but," he murmurs, scrolling with interest through the lines. And then falling silent for a /while/ to just peruse it before actually finishing his thought: "There's definitely a lot in here we /can/ use for training the /models/ before they get out there -- all computing is witchcraft," he tacks on to the end of this. "'least if you ask my Pa." "Like I said, the idea was rough," Doug says, grinning a bit as it actually seems to find some traction. "But I was thinking about it the other day, when I was in Warlock's program doing some fine-tuning. It occured to me that he was probably smart enough to operate a car. At least /basically/." He wrinkles his nose, and leans over to swipe at his tablet, closing the open data file there. "But yeah. Okay. I'm glad it can be used." He glances over at Peter at the question, and opens his mouth to respond. Then he closes it, thinking. "Um. I just named it after the main character in the video game I'm working on," he admits, and colors a bit as he ducks his head over his tablet. "I just thought it sounded cool." He leans forward a bit, and taps at the screen, bringing up a yellow-and-black robot-looking CGI creature with spiky hair, who waves as Doug lifts the device. "Greetings, creatorfriend Doug! How may self assist you?" Doug purses his lips, and hums lightly. "He's still having trouble with pronouns." "I /never/ joke," Peter tells Sebastian, and as he does so, he wears his /MOST/ serious of serious faces -- staring down at him with a furious, intense expression! o_o "--but also all of /mathematics/ is basically witchcraft did you know you can use actuary tables to figure out when people are going to /die/?" He sounds as if he's thrilled to death at this recent discovery. At Doug's mention of the video game, Peter's eyebrows sling up (or down, depending on your perspective); at the sight of Warlock's mangled English, eyebrows begin to waggle. "O-oh. Kind of like -- Siri? 'Cept, I guess, more adaptable?" "Maybe like JARVIS," Sebastian murmurs, "but less snarky. And probably less -- I mean, JARVIS is /pretty/ ridiculously --" His lips press together; he doesn't finish this thought, just leaning in with elbows propped on his table as his eyes scan the code. "Hopefully he navigates better than Siri -- can you?" He glances up sharply at the mention of actuary tables, /frowning/. "... do you know /how/?" "It /is/ pretty magical," Doug says, nodding at Peter. "But it seems a little out there to think that you can /math/ when someone is going to die. I mean, how do you factor in things like speeding taxis, or random muggings?" He lifts a shoulder, and frowns at Warlock, who seems uncertain whether the inquiries are for /him/. "He's a little more advanced than Siri," Doug says, at Peter's assessment. "He pretty much keeps my network in order. He probably spends more time on the internet than she does, too." He grins. "He's addicted to Wikipedia, I think. My browser history's full of it." "Oh I mean -- really all you do is compile all this statistical data and--it's not a hundred percent accurate, it's just really close though, life insurance companies use 'em all the time. It wouldn't work for us," Peter informs Sebastian, looking down at him with a small, regretful twist of his mouth, "largely because there isn't a lot of data compiled on /mutants/ yet I mean -- we're kind of -- a unique situation? But--" He glances to Doug, and excitement flashes back into his eyes: "That's the cool thing, like -- it doesn't /need/ to factor those things in, because it just uses raw statistical data and correlates it all together and oh my /God/ they're even talking about using them to diagnose illnesses by describing your symptoms because in some limited cases they can outperform doctors though obviously they can't catch certain details that a person would catch but--" It seems, somewhere along this path, Peter forgot to breathe. He pauses -- to do precisely this. And silently begins counting back to ten. Once he has finished... He exhales. "...sorry." "Oh -- so I -- guess it couldn't, probably, really figure out yet, um, how likely a crazy archer is to snipe you if you happen to be a -- prominent mutant activist." Sebastian slumps back down into his chair, looking disappointed at this answer. "... but it could probably figure out odds on something like a brain tumor, right?" Now he sounds a little distant, teeth scraping over his lip. His fingers curl into his hair again. "Should probably get back to --" He's muttering quietly to himself, swiping away old windows to pull up new screens of code. /Actually/ his work, this time. Doug frowns at Peter's rush of words, and he laughs when the boy breaks off. "Man. I thought /B/ could do a good word dump, but I think you've got him beat." He winks at Sebastian as he says this, and then frowns at his boss' questions. He looks for a moment like he might offer some sort of answer himself, but instead skims his fingers over the screen of his tablet, sending Warlock away. "Yeah," he says, pulling up his original screen and inhaling deeply. "Back to the mines." Peter opens his mouth to respond to Sebastian's query -- first, the bit about the arrows -- but then, at the mention of the tumor... but nothing comes out. His mouth snaps shut; his face goes deep indigo -- and he proceeds to silently bury his head back into his tablet. Workworkwork.