The story of the real "FireBlaster"

Location: Somewhere in the US

Time: July 3rd, 1999.

This is the story of the real “Fire Blaster”, in the younger and sharper years of his life.
To the records, the guy is Billy Mitchell, and his luck begins today by dropping a quarter in a Pac-
Man console.
After six hours of laser-focused playing, Billy reaches the mysterious 256th board, the so-called
“split screen” level. A legend among gamers.
Half the screen turns into gobbledygook: the left side can be played as usual, but the right side is
baffling showing a jumble of text and symbols making it impossible to see the dots. Pac-Man and
the ghosts can travel in this mysterious jungle, but there is no rhyme or purpose to do that. Some
symbols can be crossed while others are walls, and the patterns are random and complex. It is a
trickier maze, full of new traps, angles, and turns, which have been designed, only you can’t see
them. You are watching a misleading mirage.

What’s going on there? Mitchell just hit one of the most famous glitches in video games’ history.
As you might have guessed, in computer terms a glitch is an abnormal behavior of software, often
referring to a video game. It can be caused by a variety of reasons such a bad software design or a
programming mistake.
As by definition a glitch tends to affect a minor part of your computer memory, it can often be
solved with the grandma’s advice, that is, by rebooting your computer. Believe it or not, it's
virtually impossible to eliminate the chance of hitting a glitch. Given the amount of hardware and
software components interacting together, there are millions of combos that could result in a glitch.
Checking every possible combination would require hundreds of years making the software
industry an unprofitable business.

In the case of Pac-Man, the (so to speak) poor programmer had used an 8-bit variable to store the
current level. For those familiar with the binary numbers, you surely know that an 8-bit number can
range from 0 to 255, which is why the game could not track levels beyond 255.
It’s pretty much the same as trying to fit a cargo of basketballs in a limousine. By the way, what
would you do if you were to calculate how many basketballs fit in a 18ft x 5ft x 6ft limousine?
Right now I am conveying some chemical and electrical signals from your neurons to find the
solution to a relatively simple problem. If you were to answer like a computer, then you would
calculate the limousine volume (540ft cubed) first. Afterward, assumed an inflated basketball is one
cubic foot, the answer is that you could fit 540 balls inside a limousine whose volume is 540 ft.
That is exactly how a machine could nail Google’s job interview. What about using some human
creativity instead? For example, you could have answered: “Infinite basketballs can fit in a
limousine!”. “Provided you left the door open.”

Can you see the difference? Today’s computers are not aware of doing a correct or wrong
operation, but they can only repeat the instructions they have been programmed for. In other words,
even if you can teach a machine to be the best Chess player in the world, ultimately it will not bedifferent from a microwave. In the meaning that it is not really aware of playing Chess. Because, in
short, machines are missing what we call "consciousness."
Having said that, I might be inclined to reply: “Who decides consciousness then? Just some organic
matter?”

Admittedly, the problem of consciousness is a hard one to solve; however, there is no reason to
believe that it cannot be explained by computer science. For example, imagine a computer that is
able to sense the world around, generating reactions through electronic signals, based on what is
perceived from outside. Just like humans do. Have you ever considered that awareness might be
nothing but a digital information system?

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