Short Story (1/2)

Battle of Wits with the Digital Detective - Chapter 1

Full title: Jun Aikawa’s Blunders, Miss/ion

4: Battle of Wits with the Digital Detective

Life is always better with more Jun! This is one of the shorter stories in Nishi+o’s Saikyou novels—Jinrui Saikyou no Tokiinally published in the Mephisto azine in 2011 Its full title in japanese is “Aikawa

Jun no shi+ppai, Miss/ion 4: Digital Tantei to no Chiekurabe”

It

was the tih to be summer, yet too soon to be

fall, when Kyoto Prefecture policewoman Sasaki Sasa called upon

huest contractor, Jun Aikaith a shameful request

“A

dental detective? Dental?”

“No,

digital detective, not

dental… I mean, there’s no way you misheard that The letters may

look siital

as dental What even

is a dental detective? What’s the matter with teeth?”

“Pretty

harsh retort there… It’s alument

What’s wrong? Why the bad mood?”

I’m

sorry for fooling around; Jun Aikawa tried to apologize, but suffice

it to say that Sasaki Sasa was simply a bit sensitive to such

frivolities—to be honest, she was quite reluctant to bring this

request before her friend Jun Aikawa, so she was not being sensitive

so much as she was, truly, in a bad mood

Why must I

do this?

She

could not shake that feeling

Of

course, she was here on account of the Godlike entities known as

bosses and superiors—“wretched is the lot of a public servant”

was certainly an apt expression

“It’s

a digital detective”

“Ah…

I think detective work is pretty digital to begin with, though”

“That’s

not what… Well, simply put, it’s a robot Or perhaps not a robot,

per se, but rather a powerful, specialized supercomputer with

detective software installed…”

Said

Sasa

As

she neither understood nor thought very well of the entity she was

introducing, there was no avoiding the lack of self-confidence in her

tone

Normally,

Jun Aikaould happily make a joke about that, but perhaps she had

grasped Sasa’s bad mood; she listened quietly

Unexpectedly

considerate of her

“The

official name of the supercomputer is, apparently, Model SH-43”

“SH…?

Oh”

Jun

Aikawa cocked her head for a moment, and then nodded

“From

‘Sherlock Holuess”

“Easy

to see, isn’t it…”

“It’s

intuitive”

“Intuitive…

Speaking of which, Model SH-43, coital

detective’, is far removed from the idea of intuition”

Sasa

spoke while looking at her notepad

She

had a good memory, so she was perfectly able to explain and comment

without looking at a notepad or whatnot, but by deliberately looking

at her notepad while talking, she was trying to make her friend, whom

she trusted, see that she had not taken this sort of knowledge to

heart, and the inforh her

In

her oay, she was being considerate too

“A

while ago, there was so similar; do you remember? A machine

beat a chess i master… A machine is

already unbeatable at Othello, or…”

“Right,

yeah”

Didn’t

a machine beat an expert on a quiz show recently? Jun Aikawa asked

“Now

that you h

that did not come from Doyle, apparently”

“Well,

even if that’s a trend, I don’t necessarily think it’s a common

thing There are plenty of machines that can’t beat experts, after

all”

“Indeed…

However, in these tiress every day of every month, nay,

every second of every ht

routines of machines have developed so rapidly that they would be

unrecognizable a decade ago…”

Then,

Sasa cut to the chase

“What

has been developed… or rather, invented, this time, is the Model

SH-43; the digital detective I think the name speaks for itself—the

concept seeht call a

'master detective’”

“A

master detective…”

“Yes”

Sherlock

Holmes

Hercule

Poirot

Kogorou

Akechi

Kousuke

Kindaichi

“Those

sorts of people… Well, e is a bit biased toward the

classics, but it’s a ned to surpass any master detective

in an investigation”

“Why

are you saying 'h? Makes it sound like

detective work is a coht So, they

successfully developed a machine like that?”

“Yes

I am not very familiar with it myself, but apparently, one inputs

relevant information about an incident, the detective software

analyzes it using statistics and logical reasoning—and then it

names the culprit”

The

truth of all this should be taken with a grain of salt, however, Sasa

added Although, since the information had already reached as far as

Sasa, in all likelihood the thing did really exist

Well,

ularly to analyze incidents—in modern

ti of information is the norm

Model

SH-43 wasthat on a massive scale, so to speak

The

problem, then, was its accuracy

“The

problem is accuracy, isn’t it”

Said

Jun Aikawa

“How

accurately can this digital detective machine pinpoint the culprit,

or the tiht”

“Indeed…