Avogadro Corp - Book Review
Avogadro Corp: The Singularity is Closer than it Appears - by William Hertling - is an excellent SF novel, which just stretches current tech a little bit to create a "sentient" AI. The story takes place on the Avogadro Corp - clearly a book version of Google (the name is even based on a number, too!). In Avogadro, David and Mike are part of the team that is creating ELOPe - a program that uses a ton of servers and information in the company e-mail servers to optimize e-mails to be convincing - to the people that will read it. I just took a Natural Language Processing earlier this year, and overall that seems reasonable - just very hard. Tons of servers and a lot of e-mails to process should help. Just as the project is going to be canceled because it just uses too many servers, David sets the program to go wild on an attempt to convince the responsible parties to get them more servers. ELOPe succeeds beyond David's wildest dreams - but not on the way he expected.....