Mountain View
And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho. And the LORD shewed him all the land ... unto the utmost sea ... and the LORD said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying I will give it unto thy seed.IF AN alien had landed on earth thirty years ago and said, not "Take me to your leader", but "Take me to your knowledge" (and why are all fictional aliens politicians, not academics?), then he would swiftly have been shown towards a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There was no place you could point to and call Knowledge, but Britannica was the closest mankind had to offer.
-- Deuteronomy XXXIV i-iv
If he landed today and made the same demand, though, we would
produce for him a computer with an Internet connection, and we'd enter
the address
http://www.altavista.digital.com. And (I'll say straightaway) he
still wouldn't get something we could point to and say "All human
knowledge is here" -- but he'd be a lot closer.
And what is Alta Vista? Well, if you've already got here you
probably know, but for completeness I'll say that Alta Vista is the
most powerful computer that Digital have ever built. It contains ten
processors and 6Gb of RAM (at current prices that's £150,000 worth,
though that's without reckoning on a quantity discount). It is used to
run Digital's database software, and in fact was conceived as a way of
publicising this software (and also Digital's ability to build
computers this powerful, should anyone else ever ever need one).
Its mission, though, is what's important. It could have been
adapted from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy:
| Alta Vista: | What is this great task for which I, Alta Vista, the greatest computer in the History of the Digital Equipment Corporation, have been called into existence? |
| Programmer: | O Alta Vista Computer, the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us ... the Answers! |
| Alta Vista: | The Answers? The Answers to what? |
| Programmer: | Life! The Universe! Everything! |
| Alta Vista: | Tricky. |
| Programmer: | But can you do it? |
| Alta Vista: | Yes. I can do it. |
Alta Vista's mission is to create a searchable index of every word on
every page on the whole of the World Wide Web. A bunch of less awesome
computers take upon themselves the task of fetching once each Web page
there is, and updating the database accessed by the main server.
This is an endeavour of utter grandeur. Mankind still has a large
body of what might be called "legacy knowledge", knowledge that exists
only on paper (for instance, the 1966 alien's Britannica). But already
most truly new knowledge appears on the Web as it is created. Alta
Vista's effect is wider than that of a new gizmo on a computer
somewhere. Its breadth of "reading" means it is becoming nothing less
than a instantly searchable concordance to the entire of human
knowledge. It's not "a" database. It's the database.
If you work with the Internet as much as I do, you'll need, like
me, to step back and pause awhile as the enormity of that prospect
sinks in. Never before in human history could such a thing have
existed. Like the atomic bomb, it cannot be unmade. The collective
consciousness of humanity (or, if you don't feel like being that
mystic, the individual's sense of community and importance)
must adjust to encompass it.
In the olden days, when a physicist wanted a partial differential
equation solved, a student was called in to solve it. At the end of
three years of appalling and unremitting slog, the physicist had the
answer and the student had a PhD in physics. In modern times a
computer can give the answer in a fraction of the time, freeing
physics PhD students to do more entertaining things, such as read
their friends' Web pages.
The Web, and Alta Vista, promise an overthrow of the current world
order in the textual and subjective disciplines matching that brought
in the numerical disciplines by the single computer. No longer does it
take a PhD's worth of work to discover what Shakespeare thought about
astronomy: a search on Alta Vista can provide references to each time
he mentions it. (Of course, Alta Vista automates only the
data-gathering phase of such a PhD, just as Fortran automates only the
results-gathering phase of a PhD in theoretical physics. But
historically these, and not the demanding and intellectually
interesting phases, have often been the greater parts in time and
effort of both species of PhD.)
Alta Vista also provides a "gold standard" of knowledge: a place
where you can be sure something is, if it exists at all. This in itself
is not new: Great Britain (like most countries) operates "copyright
libraries" which is an unfortunate name for a system whereby a certain
set of libraries (the British Library, the National Libraries of
Scotland and Wales, and the libraries of Cambridge and Oxford
universities and of Trinity College, Dublin) receive one copy each of
every book which is published.
As I'm a graduate of Cambridge University, I'm in theory allowed to
use the University Library. I don't reckon I ever will, though. I went
in there once, when I was an undergraduate, seeking a certain piece of
information. The UL is a vast building, which reputedly served as the
inspiration for the design of Deep Thought in the television
Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. It is grim and Orwellian
in architecture, and, once you get in, the staff prove to be equally
grim and Orwellian. I had a lot of time on my hands, so I eventually
found the right section, pulled out in turn each of the five or so
books on the topic, and found nothing. Searching the books took ten
minutes; gaining admittance and finding them had taken all afternoon.
Fortunately, this most reclusive piece of information was nothing
to do with my degree; I was reading Alan Garner's novel Red
Shift and wanted to know how to use the Lewis Carroll cipher to
decode a message given in the endpapers.
(At least I never felt in fear for my life in the UL, which I
certainly did in the lift [I was told it was called a paternoster lift]
in Birmingham University library. Is that still there? What is
their accident insurance like?)
Searching Alta Vista for "+carroll +cipher", on the other hand,
gives the right answer immediately. By the time Alta Vista had been
invented, though, I'd eventually noticed some odd things about letter
frequencies in the message and derived for myself the still, small
fact which the UL hadn't provided: the Lewis Carroll cipher is the
same as the Vigenère cipher.
Sadly, though, Alta Vista is not complete, and for reasons more
depressing than the unavailability of the three big commercial
information sources: Britannica, the OED and
Larousse Gastronomique. It seems that the Alta Vista team
underestimated the sheer size of the undertaking. Their help pages
still optimistically say that the database is continually being
rebuilt and is completely refreshed every "few days"; some documents
it serves, though, are six months old (one way you can tell is by
documents which contain CGI script includes giving the server's local
date and time), and www.iota.co.uk has been submitted several times
over a month with no sign that Alta Vista has ever visited here.
But this is not to detract from the magnitude of Alta Vista's
influence. Whether Alta Vista is halfway there, or only a tenth, it
provides compelling reason for completing the task. If Digital are
feeling they've proved their point and are disinclined to spend
further money on this "advertising campaign", then surely someone else
will take up the challenge; perhaps even the British Government -- has
there yet been suggested any better project for the Millenium
Commission to spend the Lottery money on? (Enhancing the provision of
Knowledge with the proceeds from the Lottery, a direct tax on
Stupidity: now that's creative government!)
Knowledge has changed. I don't think it's over-egging the pudding to
say that the availability of an instantly accessible full-text index of
all human textual output is the biggest change to come over knowledge
since the invention of the printing press. And maybe it's bigger,
because you can mass-produce information all you like if it doesn't end
up on the desk of the person who needs it, who might never have known
it existed.
In days of long eld, an academic might have made a pilgrimage of
knowledge to Rome or another great library of antiquity; now that
printing has been invented, the months that would take have been cut
to the day or half-day it takes to visit the UL. Two orders of
magnitude improvement. But a search on Alta Vista takes seconds:
three orders of magnitude further improvement.
We are faced with an age in which knowledge is no longer parochial.
It must be like this being a Catholic: the idea that there is an
ultimate recourse, a highest court of knowledge, a point where answers
become definite. Alta Vista isn't quite an omnipope, of course, as it
will sometimes sayNo documents match the query.and I suspect his Holiness the Pope isn't in the habit of turning round to enquiring cardinals and telling them he just doesn't know. But at least when Alta Vista gives in, we will know -- as no enquirer of any previous generation could ever have known for certain -- that what we ask is beyond the ultimate limits of the corpus of human knowledge. The era in world history in which it's credible or useful to say "I don't know" is passing. In the future the only opposite of "I know" will be "Nobody knows".
-- Peter Hartley, 9th April 1996
Afterword: 7th May 1996 Digital have themselves put together a more prosaic, but by the same token more informative, explanation of Alta Vista.
Afterword: 3rd June 1996 The people who built Alta Vista: do they lie awake at night thinking, "We've changed the shape of knowledge, we've changed world civilisation"? I suppose, seeing as I lay awake last night thinking about them thinking that, that they must.
Afterword: 5th August 1996
Date: Sun, 04 Aug 1996 21:05:45 -0700 From: Timothy McGinnis <ntsgrocr@cwnet.com> To: pdh@utter.chaos.org.uk Subject: No documents match the query. Yours is the only page that Alta Vista returns to the query (No documents match the query.) I just thought you might find that interesting.
All Rites Reversed -- Copy What You
Like