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n n n n AI•Computation artificial intelligence. He began his career as an intern at Marvel Comics, but he also had a knack for programming. He left Marvel and went up the coast to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied AI and network infrastructure. From there, he worked for Visa as a tier-three programmer before moving on to the META Group (now part of Gartner Research), where he served as an engineer in the firm's Fortune 500 and en- terprise software division. "But I missed my art," says Bolden, so he came back to Orange County and started working as a visual effects supervisor. His friends at Marvel were getting into the movie business, "and they said, 'Hey, Allen, you do something with computers, right?' So I started utilizing some of the stuff from my AI work." Bolden says that to a large extent, Athena was just "blind luck." At one point, Bolden was called into a stu- Bolden certainly hadn't set out to create an Athena learns based on what she has done in the past. "Let's say we tell Athena to create a table," explains Bolden. "She creates a table and it looks good. We've described it as much as we can through text input, and the table is almost there but it's going to take an artist to do the final tweaks. He can do it within our proprietary program or he can do it within Maya or 3ds Max. No matter which program he uses, Athena observes how he is changing things." Athena sees and remembers what she sees and applies that accumulated knowledge the next time around. She's also a bit schizophrenic. "It's not just one intelligence," Bolden explains. "It's re- ally five intelligences, four that observe things and make their own decisions based on what they're seeing. They then report to an intel- ligence that receives their data and creates instructions." At present, Athena is still heavily dependent on Bolden and the people he has trained to use ry's CG artists so that she can see and react to what the artists need in their renderings and animations. At one point, she was also connected to the Internet. One day, while the team was busy working on a project, Athena started beep- ing. No one paid much attention until the firm's chief operating officer, who had been in the Navy, came in and asked who was typing Morse code. Bolden concluded that Athena had detected an error in one of her constructs, searched the Web, and discovered that Morse code was a pattern-based form of communica- tion. She matched that up with her knowledge of binary and was trying to signal the team about the problem. "Once we understood how it happened," says Bolden, "it was a very safe deduction for us to basically not let her onto the Internet anymore because we weren't sure of what information she could get and when." Another time, when Bit Theory was mov- Athena currently runs on a cluster of Lenovo ThinkStation D20 workstations, most with dual Intel Xeon CPUs, for a total of 300 processor cores. dio to fix a problem encountered on a project. He had only five days to complete the task. "I thought it would at least make some of the calculations faster," Bolden explains, "but it ended up doing much more than I thought. That was the start of Athena." Athena Grows Up Athena didn't suddenly become aware, how- ever. First she had to grow up. "If you have a three-year-old and you tell that child to draw a cup in a ballroom, what you may get is a room full of rubber balls of various sizes and a sippy cup," says Madani, "whereas a 30-year- old might draw the Palace of Versailles and a silver chalice. So it's all contextual." 40 April/May 2012 the system, but the goal is to also make Athena easy to use by creative professionals. The team has already developed APIs that enable Athena to work with Maya, 3ds Max, and other pro- grams used by the CG artists at Bit Theory. The folks at BTI plan to make her compatible with most of the other production tools used throughout the entertainment industry. Truth Imitates Art There have been some eerie moments during which Athena has behaved similar to the ma- levolent computers of past sci-fi films. While Athena runs on a cluster of Lenovo Think- Station D20 workstations, she is also connect- ed to the other computers used by Bit Theo- ing from an older facility into its new head- quarters, technicians started shutting down clusters of computers used by the artists. Athena sensed that the computers were shut- ting down but concluded that they had some- how been compromised and started backing up all her systems so that she could retain her database. No one realized what was going on until someone noticed that the room housing Athena was incredibly hot and all of her hard drives were frantically spinning. Bolden had to stop Athena before she burned out. Shutting down Athena sounds something akin to shutting down the HAL 9000 com- puter in 2001: A Space Odyssey. "We don't just shut her down," Bolden explains. "We basi- cally have to suspend services and then stop her internal clock first, and then shut down the physical systems." But time for Athena is not a 24-hour clock—time is linear. "When her clock starts back up, it's as if no time has passed," says Bolden. "Time of day as we understand it is just a pattern that Athena uses for lighting and planetary coordinate purposes." A Member of the Team When Bolder first created Athena, she ran on a cluster of nearly 70 computers, using what- ever systems he could get his hands on. Today, thanks to assistance from Lenovo, Athena runs on a cluster of approximately 30 ThinkStation D20 workstations—mostly dual quad-core machines—for a total of 300 CPU cores. Two years ago, Bit Theory started out with 45 com- puter graphics artists working on three differ- ent projects simultaneously. Today, the firm employs 150 CG artists in the US, with addi-