On screen Virgil made a disgusted face. Banana no, banana no, he replied. Peach!
Hobo thought about this, then: Peach good, banana good good.
Shoshana had expected Hobo to lose interest in the webcam chat with Virgil long before this — he didn’t have much of an attention span — but he seemed to be loving every minute. Her first thought was that it must be nice to be talking to another ape, but she mentally kicked herself for such a stupid prejudice. Chimps were much more closely related to humans than they were to orangutans; Hobo and Virgil’s lineages split from each other eighteen million years ago, whereas she and Hobo had a common ancestor as recently as four or five million years ago.
Still, it seemed that Virgil wanted to go. Well, it was getting late where he was, and orangutans were much more solitary by nature. Bed soon, Virgil signed.
Talk again? asked Hobo.
Yes yes, said Virgil.
Hobo grinned and signed, Good ape.
And Virgil signed back, Good ape.
Harl Marcuse lifted his bushy eyebrows in a “what can you do?” expression, and Shoshana knew what he meant. As soon as they released the video of this, their critics would seize on that particular exchange, saying that was all Hobo and Virgil were doing: a good aping of human behavior. It was obvious to Shoshana that the two primates really were communicating, but there would be papers ridiculing what was happening here as another example of the “Clever Hans” effect, named for the horse that appeared to be able to count but had really just been responding to unconscious cues from its handlers.
That sort of closed-mindedness was rampant in academia, Shoshana knew. She remembered reading a few years ago about Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist who’d made the startling discovery of soft tissue, including blood vessels, in a Tyrannosaurus rex femur. She’d had one peer reviewer tell her he didn’t care what her data said, he knew what she was claiming wasn’t possible. She’d written back, “Well, what data would convince you?” And he’d replied, “None.”
Yes, prejudice ran deep, and even video of this wouldn’t convince the die-hard primate-language skeptics. But the rest of the world should find it a compelling demonstration: the two apes weren’t hearing any audio and there was no way they could smell each other: the only communication between them was through sign language, and it was obviously a real conversation.
Shoshana looked again at Marcuse. As much as she was intimidated by him, she also admired the man: he had stuck to his guns for four decades now, and this interaction might finally get him the vindication he deserved.
Having Hobo and Virgil chat was an idea that had grown out of the stillborn ApeNet project, founded in 2003 by British musician Peter Gabriel and American philanthropist Steve Woodruff. ApeNet had hoped to link Washoe, Kanzi, Koko, and Chantek, who represented four different kinds of great apes — common chimpanzee, bonobo chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan — in video conferences over the Internet. But ApeNet’s president, Lyn Miles, lost custody of Chantek, the orang she had enculturated in her home, and then Washoe the chimp died. Politics and funding prevented the project from ever getting off the ground.
Enter Harl Marcuse, who had rescued Hobo from the Georgia Zoo and had found enough private-sector benefactors to keep his project alive despite the ridicule, which, as he said, was nothing new. Noam Chomsky had pooh-poohed ape-language studies from the start. And in 1979, Herbert Terrace, who had worked with an ape he’d mockingly named Nim Chimpsky, had turned around and published a damning report that said although Nim had learned 125 signs, he couldn’t use them sequentially and had no grasp of grammar. And in his bestseller The Language Instinct, Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who had become a media darling, filling the void left by the deaths of Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, trashed studies that showed apes could manage sophisticated communication.
Shoshana had lost count of the number of times she’d been told that pursuing ape-language research would be career suicide, but, damn it all, at moments like this — two apes talking over the Web! — she didn’t regret her choice at all. They were making history here. Take that, Steven Pinker!
Chapter 16
It was now way past Caitlin’s bedtime, but — hot damn! — she was seeing the Web!
Her mother and father stayed with her, and she kept downloading the new software over and over again into her implant in order to keep the Web connection open. Her father was (so her mom had told her) a good artist, and Caitlin was describing what she saw for him so he could draw it. Of course, she couldn’t see the drawings, so none of them knew if he was getting it right but, still, it was important to have some sort of record, and—
The phone rang. Caitlin had the caller ID hooked up through her computer, and it announced, “Long Distance, Unknown Caller.”
She hit the speakerphone button and said, “Hello.”
“Miss Caitlin,” wheezed the familiar voice.
“Dr. Kuroda, hi!”
“I have an idea,” he said. “Do you know about Jagster?”
“Sure,” said Caitlin.
“What’s that?” asked her mom.
“It’s an open-source search-engine — a competitor for Google,” said Kuroda. “And I think it may be of use to us.”
Caitlin swiveled in her chair to face her computer and typed “jagster” into Google; not surprisingly, the first hit wasn’t Jagster itself — no need for Coke to redirect customers to Pepsi! — but rather an encyclopedia entry about it. She brought the article up on screen so her mother could read it.
From the Online Encyclopedia of Computing: GOOGLE IS THE de facto PORTAL TO THE WEB, AND MANY PEOPLE FEEL THAT A FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION SHOULDN’T HOLD THAT ROLE — ESPECIALLY ONE THAT IS SECRETIVE ABOUT HOW IT RANKS SEARCH RESULTS. THE FIRST ATTEMPT TO PRODUCE AN OPEN-SOURCE, ACCOUNTABLE ALTERNATIVE WAS WIKIA SEARCH, DEVISED BY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO HAD PUT TOGETHER WIKIPEDIA. HOWEVER, BY FAR THE MOST SUCCESSFUL SUCH PROJECT TO DATE IS JAGSTER.
THE PROBLEM IS NOT WITH GOOGLE’S THOROUGHNESS, BUT RATHER WITH HOW IT CHOOSES WHICH LISTINGS TO PUT FIRST. GOOGLE’S PRINCIPAL ALGORITHM, AT LEAST INITIALLY, WAS CALLED PAGERANK — A JOKEY NAME BECAUSE NOT ONLY DID IT RANK PAGES BUT IT HAD BEEN DEVELOPED BY LARRY PAGE, ONE OF GOOGLE’S TWO FOUNDERS. PAGERANK LOOKED TO SEE HOW MANY OTHER PAGES LINKED TO A GIVEN PAGE, AND TOOK THAT AS THE ULTIMATE DEMOCRATIC CHOICE, GIVING TOP POSITIONING TO THOSE THAT WERE LINKED TO THE MOST.
SINCE THE VAST MAJORITY OF GOOGLE USERS LOOK AT ONLY THE TEN LISTINGS PROVIDED ON THE FIRST PAGE OF RESULTS, GETTING INTO THE TOP TEN IS CRUCIAL FOR A BUSINESS, AND BEING NUMBER ONE IS GOLD — AND SO PEOPLE STARTED TRYING TO FOOL GOOGLE. CREATING OTHER SITES THAT DID LITTLE MORE THAN LINK BACK TO YOUR OWN SITE WAS ONE OF SEVERAL WAYS TO FOOL PAGERANK. IN RESPONSE, GOOGLE DEVELOPED NEW METHODS FOR ASSIGNING RANKINGS TO PAGES. AND DESPITE THE COMPANY’S MOTTO — “DON’T BE EVIL” — PEOPLE COULDN’T HELP BUT QUESTION JUST WHAT DETERMINEDWHO NOW GOT THE TOP SPOTS, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING NUMBERTEN AND NUMBER ELEVEN MIGHT BE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN ONLINE SALES.
BUT GOOGLE REFUSED TO DIVULGE ITS NEW METHODS, AND THAT GAVE RISE TO PROJECTS TO DEVELOP FREE, OPEN-SOURCE, TRANSPARENT ALTERNATIVES TO GOOGLE: “FREE” MEANING THAT THERE WOULD BE NO WAY TO BUY A TOP LISTING (ON GOOGLE, YOU CAN BELISTED FIRST BY PAYING TO BE A “SPONSORED LINK”); “OPEN SOURCE” MEANING ANYONE COULD LOOK AT THE ACTUAL CODE BEING USED AND MODIFY IT IF THEY THOUGHT THEY HAD A FAIRER OR MORE EFFICIENT APPROACH; AND “TRANSPARENT” MEANING THE WHOLE PROCESS COULD BE MONITORED AND UNDERSTOOD BY ANYONE.
WHAT MAKES JAGSTER DIFFERENT FROM OTHER OPEN-SOURCE SEARCH ENGINES IS JUST how TRANSPARENT IT IS. ALL SEARCH ENGINES USE SPECIAL SOFTWARE CALLED WEB SPIDERS TO SCOOT ALONG, JUMPING FROM ONE SITE TO ANOTHER, MAPPING OUT CONNECTIONS. THAT’S NORMALLY CONSIDERED DREARY UNDER-THE-HOOD STUFF, BUT JAGSTER MAKES THIS RAW DATABASE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE AND CONSTANTLY UPDATES IT IN REAL-TIME AS ITS SPIDERS DISCOVER NEWLY ADDED, DELETED, OR CHANGED PAGES.IN THE TRADITION OF SILLY WEB ACRONYMS (“YAHOO!” STANDS FOR “YET ANOTHER HIERARCHICAL OFFICIOUS ORACLE”), JAGSTER IS SHORT FOR “JUDICIOUSLY ARRANGEDGLOBAL SEARCH-TERM EVALUATIVE RANKER” — AND THE BATTLE BETWEEN GOOGLE AND JAGSTER HAS BEEN DUBBED THE “RANKER RANCOR” BY THE PRESS…