Vernor Vinge, a mathematician and prolific science fiction creator who in the Nineteen Eighties wrote a novella offering an early insight into what became often known as cyberspace and shortly thereafter hypothesized that artificial intelligence would surpass human intelligence, died March 20 in La The Jolla area of San Diego. He was 79 years old.
James Frenkel, who has edited just about all of his works since 1981, said the cause of death at the nursing facility was Parkinson’s disease.
David Brinscience fiction author and friend of Mr. Vinge, said in tribute on Facebook, “Vernor fascinated millions with stories of possible tomorrows made even more vivid by his outstanding command of language, drama, character and the implications of science.”
Mr. Vinge (pronounced VIN-jee) was famous for his novella “True Names” (1981), by which he created an early version of cyberspace – a virtual reality technology he called “The Other Plane” – a yr before William Gibson’s release, the nascent digital ecosystem was named in the story “Burning Chrome”, and three years later he popularized the word in his novel “Neuromancer”.
In “True Names”, Mr. Slippery, one of the anonymous computer hackers often known as wizards working in the Other Plane, is identified and captured by the government (the “Great Enemy”) and compelled to assist stop the threat posed by one other wizard.
In a 2001 article about Mr. Vinge, Katie Hafner, then a technology reporter for The New York Times, wrote that “True Names” “depicts a world filled with pseudonymous characters and other elements of Internet life that now seem almost ho-hum,” adding that in retrospect the book seemed “prophetic.”
Mr. Vinge’s interest in computers at San Diego State University, where he began teaching in 1972, led to his vision of the “technological singularity,” the tipping point at which machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence and then surpasses it.
He described an early version of his vision in Omni Magazine in 1983.
“We are in the process of accelerating the evolution of intelligence itself,” he wrote, adding: “Whether our work is cast in silicon or DNA will have little impact on the final results.” He wrote that the moment of intellectual transition will be “as impenetrable as the tangled space-time at the center of a black hole” and that at that moment “the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”
Ten years later, he highlighted the mental transformation – the singularity – in the article (subtitled “How to survive in the post-human era”) at a symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute.
“Within 30 years,” he said, “we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Soon after, the era of man will come to an end. Can such progress be avoided? If it is not to be avoided, can events be directed so that we can survive?”
This prediction did not come true, but artificial intelligence has accelerated to the point that some fear that technology will replace them.
Mr. Frenkel said that Mr. Vinge used the concept of singularities in his “Thought Zones” series, in which they are superintelligent beings from a part of the galaxy called the Transcend.
“These are entities of pure thought,” Mr. Frenkel said in an interview. “They are extremely powerful. Some are benevolent, some are malevolent.”
Two novels in the series, “Fire from the Deep” (1993) and “The Depths of Heaven” (2000), won the Hugo Award, the highest honor in science fiction. Mr. Vinge won a Hugo Award for his next novel, “Rainbow’s End” (2007), and for the novellas “Fast Times at Fairmont High” (2002) and “Cookie Monster” (2004).
Reviewing the book “A Fire Upon the Deep” in Wired magazine, Peter Schwartz wrote: “Since William Gibson gave us the fully realized world of cyberspace in Neuromancer, no one has given us such a rich diet of new ideas. Imagine a universe in which the laws of physics change along the axis of the great circle of the Milky Way.”
Vernor Steffen Vinge was born on October 2, 1944, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and moved with his family to East Lansing, Michigan, where his father, Clarence, taught geography at Michigan State University. His mother, Ada Grace (Rowlands) Vinge, was a geographer who wrote two books with her husband.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Michigan State in 1966, Mr. Vinge earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. studied the same subject at the University of California, San Diego in 1968 and 1971. He began teaching mathematics at San Diego State University in 1972, but switched to computer science when he started “twiddling with real computers” in the early 1970s. said Times. In 2000, he retired to focus on writing.
“Vernor enjoyed teaching and was highly regarded with students, but he mentioned that he only really found time to jot down between semesters (mostly in the summer),” John Carroll, a colleague in the computer science department at San Diego State and his real estate contractor, wrote in an e- e-mail. “Something had to give and his teaching could have been carried on by others, but the increased flow of novels and ideas was irreplaceable.”
Mr. Vinge’s first published story, “Apartness,” appeared in New Worlds magazine in 1965. Four years later, he published his first novel, “The World of Grimm,” which centers around a 700-year-old science fiction magazine – published on a giant barge traveling around around the world – this is the source of technological progress in the world.
His marriage to Joan Dennison in 1972 ended in divorce seven years later, but they remained friends. As Joan Vinge, she won five Hugo Awards. In 1980, she married Mr. Frenkel, who is her editor. Mr. Vinge’s sister, Patricia Vinge, is his only direct victim.
Mr. Vinge was teaching networking and operating systems when he came up with the idea for “Real Names.” In the late 1970s, he was using an early form of instant messaging called Talk when he and another user tried to guess each other’s names.
“I finally gave up and told the other person that I had to go — that I was in fact a personality simulator and that if I kept talking, my artificial nature would be revealed,” he was quoted as saying in a 2001 Los Angeles Times article . “Later I realized I had just experienced a science fiction story.”
Mr. Vinge returned to the topic of oddities from time to time.
During an interview in 2000 for the NPR program “Fresh Air”, said his predictions were partly inspired by Moore’s Law, which was formulated in 1965 by Gordon Moore, then head of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor and later founder of Intel. The law stated that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year, without any major increase in cost, exponentially increasing computing power. Mr. Moore later changed this provision to every two years.
The logical conclusion that Moore’s Law suggested, Vinge said, was that “we’ll reach an intersection” where computers will become as intellectually powerful as humans – “assuming someone can program them.”
