Branch Prediction

April 2007

A poem about the theory and practice of computer science? I’m glad you asked. I have no excuse other than I had just watched Blade Runner, and somehow it worked.

“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”
– Alan Turing

Branches are the bane of modern computing.
Choice is the chief obstacle: the machine plays twenty
Moves ahead. The straight-line future is easy,
But there’s a fork in the works (pardon the expression).
Proceed therefore down the likely path. If not,
It never was. Modern computing is impossible
Without branching.

This sentence is false.
This sentence cannot be proven true.
This sentence has no truth value.
This sentence is a Turing test.

I’ll show you 36 blades of grass and you’ll tell me
Which one was planted by hand.
I’ll show you 300 acres of open desert and you’ll tell me
Where a camel passed three weeks ago.
I’ll show you 4,000 faces –

The computer can identify your face. The computer
Can identify the face of Thomas Jefferson.
It can be identified as “face.”
Also, if held just right, the black and white panels of a soccer ball.

(If you hold anything just right…)

I’ll show you the orbit of Jupiter, pi to 600 digits, and you’ll
Tell me the position of 63 moons, and the time of planet rise
Above far-flung, ice-wrapped Ganymede.

There’s a cluster of perhaps 200 cells involved
In all mathematical thinking in the human brain.
It takes over 2 million to do jumping jacks.

I’ll show you the Devil in a grain of sand,
Jerusalem etched in fine wire.

This sentence is a loaded gun pointed at the internet.
(If you hold it just right)
This poem is a linear-time factorization algorithm.
(No, it’s not.)
This poem is linear. (So far.)

This poem is actually two poems, the second of which will be given to you upon its completion by the world’s first poetry-reading, poetry-writing artificial intelligence (with thirty-two processors given over to metonymy alone.) This machine will have a detailed technical designation, but its programmers will refer to it as “Ralph Waldo Electron.”

This poem had better pass the Turing test.