517 First Law

I’m hoping the computer killed him …


Summary: The FBI investigates a murder with an unusual prime suspect

Original air date: March 6, 2009 (US)

Written by: Sean Crouch

Directed by: Steve Boyum

Opening numbers:

2: Million lines of code
80: Million processes per second
985: Million personal computers
1: Artificial intelligence


Family Concepts: (character development)

  • Charlie is offered a position with DARPA, which he turns down
  • Larry worked for DARPA and Jane Karellen when he was younger
  • Larry and Jane were involved romantically
  • Amita was born June 10, 1975 at 6:31AM at Cedar Sinai Hospital
  • CalSci’s mascot is the Otters
  • Alan is the defacto basketball coach

Episode Quotes:

  • Alan: It’s not how you play the game; it’s whether you win or lose.
  • Larry: That doesn’t sound right …

Episode Synopsis:

Dr Daniel Robertson seems to have created the holy grail of computing: a living computer named Baley.  Unfortunately the real proof of Baley’s sentience may be the death of Dr Robertson in his closed and locked lab.  The FBI are called in because Baley is part of a DARPA project into artificial intelligence, Charlie and Amita are asked by DARPA rep Jane Karellen to consult.  Jane it seems has a professional interest in Charlie’s work, something Larry cautions against Charlie doing.

Amita suggests giving Baley a version of the Turing Test to assess her intelligence.  David and Liz decide to start interviewing people in Daniel’s life to try and find other motives.  They start with Jesse Robertson, Daniel’s wife.  Jesse claims Daniel never brought his work home due to security concerns and the two of them worked on creating a “smart house” as a way to work on a project together. She suggests Daniel’s boss at Steel Cave, Dr Joe Baskin, would have plenty of motive for killing Daniel.  Baskin denies he would want to do anything to Daniel as Dr Robertson was basically the companies meal ticket for government funding and suggests David and Liz talk to Claire Wells, Daniel’s assistant and “mechanic” for Baley.  They hit another block with Claire informs them she knew very little about Baley outside of its hardware needs.

Amita is talking to Baley about the day Daniel died to figure out why the computer is missing data from the time of Robertson’s death when the system again goes into a shut down mode trapping Amita in the lab.  She escapes with the help of Charlie and Jesse who track a hacker into the sewer systems using Baley’s schematics and tracing his movements in cyberspace.  Andrew Gibbons is arrested for the murder of Robertson and the attempted murder of Amita, charges he denies saying he was only there to wipe Baley’s memory.

Charlie is suspicious of Baley’s AI after his meeting with Jesse.  As he points out, work Daniel and Jesse did at home with cybernetics is completely different to the type of AI Daniel was working on with Baley.  Charlie and Amita go through Baley’s code and discover she is programmed to do one thing, pass the Turing Test, she is a fraud. With that information Don is able to investigate the books for the Baley project and finds tens of thousands of dollars in computer equipment shipped to Claire Wells apartment.  Thinking Wells knows something of the fraud, David and Liz go to pick her up for questioning only to find her dead.

Joe Baskin is also arrested, and charged with the murders and the fraud after Gibbons admits Baskin hired him to wipe Baley’s memory.  Baskin denies killing anyone though he admits he and Daniel created the fraud together in order to steal millions from DARPA.  When he is shown a receipt for the computer equipment sent to Claire, Baskin states he wondered if the two were having an affair and the receipt proves it, Robertson was buying Wells gifts, not buying her silence about Baley.  The medical examiner had stated Wells was a victim of a crime of passion, and arrest Jesse, who admits she killed both Daniel and Claire because she had found out about their affair.