I REALLY don't know how to put this, but I have the distinct impression that my humble Macintosh Performa 630 has fallen in love with Deep Blue, the super computer which defeated Gary Kasparov. I have warned my little darling that Deep Blue is very unpredictable following its exchange of pawns instead of the anticipated Qb6 (Queen to Bishop Six for the uninitiated), which rattled the Grand Master but Performa simply doesn't seem capable of getting this fact into its silly little 8MB of RAM.
The result is that every time I type the words Deep Blue, a grey rectangle bearing the words `initialising modem' appears on the screen, the dial tone is heard and is followed by the sound of `tone dialling'. There it goes again: "Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep", in varying musical notes which represent 662 4777, the dial-up number of Ireland-On-Line and the first step in its attempts to scour the Internet for its lover.
AS its name ends in the letter A I have assumed that Performa is a female though a thorough examination of its anatomy has shown no tell-tale signs of either sex. The rest of our household, made up of three women, assures me that Performa is most definitely a male. Its behaviour in making phone calls to its putative lover at the most inconvenient and nonsensical times, is a living proof, they tell me, of that fact.
But Performa may not be all that stupid. Deep Blue (there goes that Beep-Beep-Beep again), as part of the deal in its match against Kasparov benefitted to the tune of $700,000 which it intends to give back to its owners, IBM, for further research into how a tonne and a half of silicon and other materials can do even better in achieving its life's ambition to beat the byte out of the best human chess master the world has ever known. Performa I am convinced is trying to get its own hands on the loot.
The money could, of course, be used to better effect while still remaining in the world of computers.
In the course of the past week, for example, I tried to book a room in a fine old hotel in the town of Ennis in the Co Clare as part of my efforts to ascertain as much information as possible before forecasting which Dail seats in the county will be won by which candidates in the forthcoming general election.
"We don't know if we have any rooms free," the voice at the other end of the line informed me: "Our computer system is down." In the old days there was a foolproof method of knowing how the famous "bed-nights" were coming along: a young woman was sent around at an unearthly hour of the morning, when all occupants were still in bed, to rap loudly on the door and ask the question: "Will you be leaving today, Sir?"
Nowadays, the guests who are already in possession get a chance to sleep, but those Who have not yet been allocated a room are left wondering if they will have anywhere to put their head down. Some of the IBM money could be used to fix this little problem.
Help may also needed on the political front. One TD, known to be the most computerised in the business, has also been punished by some of its failures.
On one occasion many years ago, for example, I found myself having a pint with him in a hostelry very close to the offices of The Irish Times. A barman, recognising his local Dail deputy, approached and wished him well, adding as an aside, that his father had recently passed away. "I am terribly sorry to hear that. When did he die?" asked the deputy. "I thought you knew that," the barman replied, "as you sent me a letter of condolences."
Here was the ultimate example of the computer taking revenge on its master. It sent out the letter as soon as the deputy's back was turned, didn't tell him anything about it, and waited, chuckling to itself, until the chance meeting, the odds against, which it had quietly calculated, occurred. Then it was "checkmate", one vote lost forever.
COMPUTERS can, of course, do much nastier things than embarrass a Dail deputy in front of a journalist or cause confusion in hotels. The measure of this was contained in a report in the Washington Times recently. The Times appears to have a very reliable Deep Throat in that section of the Central Intelligence Agency which deals with the Russian Federation and the other countries which once made up the "indestructible union of free republics" known as the USSR.
A 13-page classified document arrived with an almost nuclear plonk in the newspaper's mailbox last week. It contained the most frightening news yet about the havoc computers can wreak on the billions of mere humans who inhabit this planet.
Since the Cold War ended, Russia's vast arsenal of nuclear weapons have been snoozing comfortably in their silos switched to benign mode by the "Made in USSR" computers which control them.
Russian computers may not be the world's fastest, they have been known, for example, to create two-hour delays at passport control in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, but they have had a reputation in the business as good reliable plodders which don't risk accuracy for speed.
The report to the Washington Times, however, damaged this reputation irreparably. There had been, it said, a number of "glitches", details of which had been passed on to the CIA by a former officer in the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces. These "glitches" took the form of switching the arsenal, which can destroy the entire planet several times over, from benign to another mode known in the missile trade as "combat".
While Deep Blue (off goes Performa again), was swapping pawns instead of employing Qb6, its Russian counterpart, which for the purposes of this column shall be known as Deep Red, instead of dozing away itself was wide awake and contemplating its reply in terms of "SS30s-Manhattan-checkmate". You will be glad to hear that Mr Nicholas Burns, of the US State Department, has informed us we had nothing to worry about, he checked the matter out on the office computer.