The Problem with Frodo

'Butterflies the size of dinner plates flapped slowly past, towing the electric clouds behind them.'

Approx. 2,478 words.

“’Two lemon flavored elephants doing a samba on a frozen lake.’ I’ll tell you, Mark, that gold-plated piece of electronic circuitry has blown a fuse! What does that gibberish have to do with atmospheric and geological conditions on Titan? Look, next to Don Stephens, you’re the top man in the IT department. Find out what’s wrong, and give me a report by last week. When our lander begins sending back strange information like this, how can we place credibility in any of the data?”

“It’s puzzling, Chris, but I’m sure we’ll find an answer. Frodo, the on-board computer of Cassini-3, is one of the most sophisticated computers and guidance systems NASA has ever contracted for. The code alone is more than forty mega-bytes, and it has three processors running simultaneously to verify the results of each other. Sort of like government by committee, you know? I’ll spend the weekend on this, but I can’t promise I’ll have anything by Monday. There are so many variables to taken into account…”

Chris Jennings cut him short with an up-raised hand. “Don’t tell me why you can’t do it, Mark. Tell me what’s wrong and how we’re going to fix a 600 million dollar space probe three-quarters of a billion miles from the nearest Radio Shack.” The tone of his voice was urgent, curt and abrupt.

“Yes, sir,” Mark Davis replied. Truthfully, he had no idea where to begin or any estimate how long it would take to debug six million lines of code. He rose and left the Mission Director’s cubical. Two floors down, at the end of a long hallway planned to insulate him from the occasional visitor, Mark entered his own kingdom. Well, almost his. Don Stephens was the official king, but he’d been absent six weeks while undergoing physical therapy and learning to walk again, following a pileup on I-95 while returning from a weekend at Daytona Beach.

“Gloria, Tom, Kevin!” Mark called. “My office, now!” A multitude of heads appeared above the dividers separating the room into working cubicals, curious to learn what was happening and why it was so urgent. “Alright you prairie dogs, this doesn’t concern you. Back to your computer games and pretend you’re actually working.” Instantly fifteen heads ducked out of sight.

Mark and Don were the only two programmers assigned to the project who each had a private office. Mark plopped into the swivel chair behind his formica-topped desk and removed three plastic covered notebooks from his lower left drawer as his underlings marched in and seated themselves on the comfortable sofa. Each of them wore a blank expression. Would this be another cutback? A new project? Would someone get a promotion?

“We’ve had some glitches with Frodo,” Mark said. “I hope none of you have plans for this weekend because we’ll be camped out in Don’s office trying to debug this code.

“Gloria, call housekeeping and get Don’s desk and furniture temporarily stored somewhere. Have them set up two conference tables and half a dozen chairs. Get us the biggest coffee urn they have and a cabinet for coffee, cream, and sugar. We’ll be working just about non-stop until we get a handle on this problem. If any of you need a break, we’ll take turns on the sofa here in my office.”

“I’m on it, Mark,” Gloria Fukijita said. She began to leave his office immediately but he motioned her back to the sofa with his hand.

“Frodo,” he said, referring to the space-probe which had landed on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn and the largest in the solar system, twenty-four days ago, “has been transmitting some unusual data. In addition to the expected temperatures, wind speed, atmospheric analysis and soil composition, we’re getting text which makes no sense at all.”

“Text?” Kevin English asked. “Frodo is programmed to record any observed data not specifically requested in programming tasks, evaluate it and transmit in the event the information might be useful to someone here at NASA. What sort of text are we getting?”

“Nonsense,” Mark said. “Butterflies the size of dinner plates flapped slowly past, towing the electric clouds behind them. The ratio of an igloo’s circumferance to the radius is equivalent to 2 Eskimo pi.” There’s more, but I think you get the idea. Whatever is happening is not part of Frodo’s programming.

“I’ll admit that strange, even humorous, Mark, but why the urgency?”

“The folks in the head-shed feel if Frodo is sending us garbage, how can we trust any of the other data we receive? Besides, if the press ever got hold of this, I can just see the headlines: NASA Spends $600 Million for Computer Prankster! Funding is hard enough to come by as it is, we’d be laughed off the hill when we submit our budget for next year. We’ve got to fix this and fix it now.”

Three heads nodded at him. “Okay, get on it. Tom, get a couple of our techs to install half a dozen terminals in Don’s office. We’ll need to access the local network and we may need more people to do the grunt work on this.”

“Right, boss!”

“Okay… get with it team!” Mark shoeed them out of his office and opened the first of the three-ring binders. He grabbed a Number 2 pencil and began making notes on a legal pad. He had to get his team organized and assign areas of responsibility.

* * *

Mark’s team spent the remainder of Friday going over routines, sub-routines and functions in Frodo’s code. Mark had assigned each of his team member’s a primary area of interest but urged them not to be afraid to talk amongst themselves to pursue common lines of questioning. Friday evening another line of gibberish flashed upon the monitors arrayed in their office, “2000 pounds of Chinese soup is equivalent to 1 WonTon.” Mark didn’t find it funny.

“I wonder if it’s in the evaluation and decision looping?” Gloria asked.

Tom Watson felt the comment to be a personal attack upon his ability as a programmer. “No way, Gloria. I borrowed that code from the US Navy. For safety sake, they must have redundant processors aboard nuclear submarines, just as we have in launch control. Each processor solves the same problem and the answers are compared. If one answer is significantly outside expected parameters, that processor is pulled out of the loop and kept out while diagnostics are run.”

“I was only asking, Tom. Frodo is one of the most sophisticated brains ever built. Even humans, especially humans of genius caliber, have their occasional breakdowns.”

“Frodo is not a genius, Gloria,” Mark responded. “Computers are very stupid robots and you have to be explicit in the things you tell them. Frodo is not having a breakdown; there’s a bug in the code. We’ve got to find it and correct it.”

“Can we run the code here and see what caused the glitch?” Kevin asked.

“Not in the next day or so, Kevin. Cassini-3 has been in space fourteen months, and actually on Titan twenty-four days. We can’t wait fourteen months and twenty-four days for the glitch to appear in our simulations.”

“But the glitch ocurred after touchdown,” Gloria said. “There’s no need for us to simulate the 14 months travel time.”

“I should have thought of that, Gloria!” Mark slapped his forehead. “Maybe you should be heading up this project?”

“Not me, boss,” Gloria replied. “My flashes of genius are unreliable. I get them on sale at a discount store.” Her attitude interjected a brief moment of genuine humor into their efforts. At least they had partially isolated the problem and eliminated thousands of man hours of effort.

Mark discarded two of the notebooks having to do with astrogation, position determination, measurement of angular radii and course corrections. When they were left with only one notebook, a mere 300 pages, he divided them and assigned his team members new tasks.

“Okay, let’s pick apart this code line by line. Tom, I’ll take your section while you set up the mainframe to run the after-landing routines.” They all dug in with renewed enthusiasm now that they could see a light at the end of the tunnel.

At 0137 another cryptic message was received from Frodo. “The time between slipping on a banana peel and hitting the sidewalk is equivalent to 1 bananosecond.” Mark could not stifle a small chuckle.

“That’s it for me, kiddos. When computer humor starts making me laugh, I’ve got to take a break. Wake me when you find the problem, or six in the morning, whichever comes first.”

“Now who’s making jokes, boss? We’ll still be at this next week, I’m sure.”

Mark went to his own office, loosened his tie and put his glasses on the coffee table. He removed his shoes and stretched out on the sofa. In seconds he was fast asleep. Tinkling laughter awakened him. He glanced at the Indiglo watch on his wrist, 0446. What the heck? he thought. Might as well join the party. Mark slipped on his shoes and grabbed his glasses before stumbling into the makeshift command post. Tom and Kevin were slumped forward on the conference table, heads resting on forearms. Gloria was still pouring over the printed pages of code assigned to her.

“Oh, sorry if I wakened you, Mark. This last one struck me as particularly funny. “The basic unit of laryngitis is equivalent to one hoarsepower.”

Mark chuckled. “I can see why, but even if they are getting better, are we any closer to learning why Frodo is making bad jokes?”

“It has to be somewhere in the unassigned tasks routine, boss. Data for all other routines is evaluated as numerical or boolean. Only the unassigned tasks use text to describe a condition for which Frodo has not been programmed.”

“That’s it, Gloria! You’ve put your finger on it again! May I see those pages?” She passed them to him and he quickly flipped through them looking for the code he knew was there. “That’s it!”

“What went wrong?” she asked him.

“Nothing has gone wrong, Gloria. Every thing is working just fine. Frodo is still checking to see how he feels and if he finds nothing wrong, he sends us a report, sort of, like a school kid bringing home the latest finger-painting he made in first grade. Frodo is telling us what a good boy he is!”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Kevin said through bleary eyes.

“Bad jokes means Frodo is okay?” Tom asked.

“Sure it does. Remember the programming we inserted before launch, choosing a random string from Frodo’s library and testing it in a message for output?”

“Sure,” Kevin said. “I wrote it. Frodo is supposed to choose a word from his dictionary, and put it into a phrase as meaningful text. It worked fine and I deleted it.”

“You did? Not according to what I’m seeing here, Kevin. Frodo is still running diagnostics, choosing a random word and putting it into a string of text. Because we have three processors running simultaneously, two of them are checking the text for accuracy. If it’s a question, they are solving for an appropriate reply.”

“That’s ridiculous, you mean Frodo is playing guessing games with himself?”

“What library of words did you build into Frodo’s programming, Kevin?”

“Well, I didn’t build an entire library. Don said it would be okay to use the standard English dictionary from Microsoft, and then add about 80 technical words that are required for this mission.”

Tom Watson began laughing in that booming baritone of his. “Oh, no! And we’ve been at this nearly 24 hours straight because you used the Microsoft dictionary?” He laughed again.

“But, I don’t see… I mean…” Gloria found herself laughing also.

Just then another string of text flashed onto their screens. “1,000 grams of falling figs is equivalent to 1 Fig Newton.”

The room erupted in laughter, with the exception of Kevin English who still had a perplexed look on his face. “I don’t get it, what’s going on?” he asked.

Mark, Gloria, and Tom were laughing nearly to the point of tears now they had located the harmless glitch. The solution would take no more than a few key strokes, the first to eliminate Kevin’s program to generate a random line of text and evaluate a response; the second to stop execution of spilling and grammar checking.

“Gloria,” Mark said, “it was your stroke of genius which isolated the problem. Why don’t you explain the solution to Kevin.”

Gloria used a tissue to wipe tears from the corner of her laugh filled eyes. “Kevin, how often do you send email?”

“Not more than fifty times a day, Gloria. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“And your email handler is set for automatic spell checking?”

“Of course, Gloria. I got my degree in mathematics, not English.”

“When spell-check finds an error, what does it do?”

“Why, it highlights the error, then suggests possibilities for correction.”

“Right, you ten-fingered biped. Now, the diagnostic routine you inserted before launch generates random text from one processor for transmission to Earth. Before Frodo sends it, the other two processors examine it. If one of the processors finds a mistake, it suggests a correction. The other processors look at it again and hypothecate a correction. When the random string has gone round and round a few thousand times and a response seems appropriate, Frodo transmits the phrase to us.”

“Oh, my God!” Kevin seemed astonished. Like that last phrase which had you all laughing. 1,000 grams implied a metric unit of measurment. Falling figs is clearly fruit with a velocity of accelleration. An apple is fruit. Sir Isaac was conked on the head with an apple. The three processors decided an appropriate response for 1,000 grams of falling figs must be one Fig Newton! It does make sense!”

“Just like the ratio of an igloo’s circumference to the radius. Circumeference, radius, and Eskimos all lead to the inescapable response of 2 Eskimo pi.” Mark laughed heartily.

“So Frodo is a good boy. He hasn’t been making bad jokes, he’s just been trying to make an intelligent response to nonsense words. I see what you mean, boss.”

“Good, Kevin. It was your test routine, so you write out the code to cancel it. While you’re at it, cancel the spell check routine. We’ll run that through the computer between our ears the next time Frodo sends us a message.”

“Here’s another one, boss. ‘365 days of drinking lo-calorie beer is equivalent to 1 Light Year.’”

“Good job, boys and girls,” Mark said. “I’m outahere now, on my way to Chris Jenning’s office.”

“But he won’t be in this early, Mark,” Gloria said.

“Then I’ll leave him a note. You know, I almost wish we could wait for the next bit of humor from the depths of space. Say, you don’t suppose we could…?”