Doug Lenat tugged uncomfortably at his shirt collar. It was an extremely hot August day in DC, and the White House HVAC system apparently couldn't keep up. Or perhaps Doug was just feeling the heat. He didn't particularly enjoy flying out to meet the president, but president Gingrich refused to speak by VidTel. Anyway, Advisor to the President on Computing Technology is not a job one declines.
Secretary Rumsfeld placed a black and white photocopy on the table in front of Doug. It was some kind of image, but it didn't look like much of anything to him.
Rumsfeld started into a speech. "Key Hole snapped this at 8AM JST yesterday -- That was Wednesday night for us. It's the cooling towers for their 5GC complex." Doug looked at the Secretary of Defense quizzically. "See the white clouds? That's not smoke. It's steam. It means they've started operations. Our intelligence suggests they've completed theoretical and programming work on their 'self improving autonomous learner'. That system is currently, as we speak, at full steam, solving math problems at 900 megahertz. We don't know how long it will take, but by the time it's done, they'll have an autonomous control algorithm for their Mecha 8Ks -- along with fully automated factories all across the Asian Defense Sphere to build more Mechas."
Doug's mouth opened slightly. He looked to President Gingrich. The big man took it from there. "Doug, I hope I don't have to explain to you what it would mean to the security interests of the United States -- if Japan cracks this problem before we do. Can we count on you?"
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the mid-80s, a new cold war emerged. Most Westerners laughed at the 5GC project, until the "Sputnik Moment" when ChesuKami beat Bobby Fischer in 1989. From that point on, cable TV watching Americans were enraptured, terrified to learn about the Fifth Generation Computer, a massively parallel logic system that sprawled over dozens of buildings in a Tokyo suburb. "Could it