When I was very young, I was given a book for Christmas by my slightly mad and mostly religious step-grandmother. It was a huge and marvellously illustrated picture book which should have immediately grasped my attention, but unfortunately the title of this tome was the Read ‘n Grow Picture Bible.
My family was decidedly not religious, nor were any of my friends. However, we lived a long way from the nearest library and being an avid reader, I eventually read the book that my grandmother gave me, burning through the Biblical lore contained within and imprinting it on my childhood brain. If grandma’s plan had been to convert me, it worked only briefly, because that very same year Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit television and the Bible was largely forgotten, along with being a good Christian girl.
But one part of the Bible never really left me; the story of Noah.
As I grew, it turned out I had an aptitude for problem solving and mathematics. My mother fought to get me included in advanced classes, and when she succeeded, a whole new world of numbers and equations opened up to me.
Encouraged to work on our own projects, I often returned to the problem of Noah and his Ark, and the improbability of his success in keeping all the animals alive. I researched and calculated the feed required for all the ‘common’ animals kept in conventional zoos, as well as the fresh water requirements and the volume of dung produced. In every iteration of my work the original Biblical measurements of the Ark got blown further and further out of proportion, confirming just how preposterous the idea of Noah’s Ark was.
When I presented my work to my low-key Christian high school mathematics teacher, his face flushed red and he tore my calculations to pieces, tossing them into the rubbish bin beside his desk. Then he stalked up and down in front on the blackboard, lecturing me on the ‘proper’ use of mathematics and admonishing me for my heresy.
And so for a long time, I forgot about what I referred to as the ‘Noah Problem’ and focused on repairing my relationship with my teacher.
Home computers hit the world around the time I left school, and so by the time I had finished my first year at University, computer labs had become part of the curriculum. It seemed like cheating, using these number-crunching machines. I remember a friend of mine – a photorealist artist – complaining about how photography took no skill, because there was no effort required; and I felt the same about computers. I actively enjoyed creating stacks of calculations, immersing myself in an ocean of equations and formulae, and so for a long time I resented those beige boxes with clacky keyboards, seeing them as a cheat’s conceit.
I managed without them for a long time, still turning in hand-written notes, but once I’d completed my doctorate, I realised that I had stretched myself to the limits of my mathematical capacity, and that if I didn’t adapt, I’d be left behind by peers who had availed themselves of these increasingly powerful thinking machines.
So I did.
I helped build the first supercomputer infrastructure at the university – from screwing blades to sharp-edged computer racks and running cables, to installing the operating systems and configuring the software that allowed this humming room full of hardware to interface as a single ‘brain’. I was so good at it that I was inducted into the university technology department and utilised for every future upgrade.
It was an interesting journey, watching the first modest supercomputer clusters grow from basement closets, to warehouse-sized rooms of air-conditioning and white tiles. It wasn’t long before my expertise was sought elsewhere, and I turned my talent for formulae and algorithms to creating the programs that made these huge information hives hum.
Which brings us close to present day, when I recalled my old obsession, and began to ponder the Noah Problem again.
I can’t tell you exactly who I work for, but suffice it to say that money really isn’t much of a concern to them, and so the equipment I’d been contracted to configure wasn’t just bleeding edge; much of it was so new that the boards and chips hadn’t even been officially named.
Working with this kind of infrastructure is annoying. Bugs and breakdowns are common, the first layer firmware needing constant tweaks to keep running and heat blowouts plaguing the unstable chips. But if I’m truly honest with myself, I lived for this sort of problem solving, and when everything was finally up and running, I’d always be searching for new challenges to keep my mind occupied.
The Noah Test was something I’d written years before as a sort of benchmarking tool for this type of infrastructure. Similar to the Travelling Salesman Problem, but far more complex, it involved running a simulation of what would actually be required for Noah and his children to keep X number of species alive on his floating barge. Of course, the conventional Noah’s Ark wouldn’t provide any kind of challenge to this sort of hardware, so I’d needed to get creative with how the problem worked. I’d realised very early on that one Ark was infeasible, regardless of the size. Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives were not a sufficiently large workforce for the entirety of Earth’s animal populations.
But if you kept the original dimension of the Ark and multiplied the Ark, putting different animal types in different Arks from parallel Earths, you could easily account for all the species on the planet. Leaving the entirety of the problem running would give a decent stress test on the newly installed system.
