Novelette
Number of words : 9800
Percent of complex words : 11.5
Average syllables per word : 1.6
Average words per sentence : 20.7
READABILITY INDICES
Fog : 12.9
Flesch : 54.4
Flesch-Kincaid : 10.8
PEOPLE
Daniel Cliff
A billionaire that wants to do AI research.
Julie Denghani
The best AI researcher of her generation.
Lucien Crace
A scientist for Cliff. Has a doctorate in genetic programming.
Sunil Gupta
Multimedia search engine entrepreneur.
Angela Lindstrom
Creator of AfterLife dying client avatar software.
Primo
A Phite who communicates with Daniel and gives him insight.
TECHNOLOGY
FLOPS rating
Measure of processing power for a computer.
Lattice QCD
Is a well established non-perturbative approach to solving the quantum chromodynamics theory of quarks and gluons.
AI
Artificial Intelligence.
Crystal
A photonic optical computer. Extremely expensive.
Thought Police
Phite monitoring software.
The Play Pen
Vacuum chamber containing an atomic force microscope with fifty thousand independently movable tips, arrays of solid-state lasers and photodetectors, and thousands of micro-wells stocked with samples of all the stable chemical elements.
CONCEPTS
Pascal's Wager
The name given to an argument due to Blaise Pascal for believing, or for at least taking steps to believe, in God.
Project Sapphire
Term for the Phite world experiment.
Higgs field
Theoretical field that permeates space and endows all elementary subatomic particles with mass through its interactions with them. Discovered by the Phites.
Big Bang
Universe creation event.
Matrioshka Brain
Hypothetical megastructure, based on the Dyson sphere, of immense computational capacity.
ORGANISATIONS
WiddulHands.com
Made Cliff his first billion in Social Networking for infants.
Foodexcuse.com
Where Crace made his money. Web tech that finds reasons to eat bad stuff.
Transhumanists
An international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities.
Lunar Project
Phite research operation.
RACES
Phites
A created race, crablike, used in Cliff's evolutionary intelligence experiments.
PLOT
Daniel Cliff is a technology billionaire who wants a research advantage. He thinks conventional AI research is a dead end, and decides to embark on a genetic programming evolution experiment. Thanks to his investment in advanced supercomputing technology he has the poewr to run these cycles of life far faster than time passes in the real world.
Various successes and failures happen, but he pushes his creations to outstrip humans in the area of physics. They discover the Higgs field and bootstrap themselves out of their computing prison, leaving him severely burned in the process, with his rivals catching up to him.
5 out of 5
http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/
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