"01 - Code of the Lifemaker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

they appeared to have preserved the whole subfile among them. So the
Supervisor had to retrieve different pieces from different Freds to fit
them together again in a way that made sense. And that was how it arrived
at the version it eventually handed to the Scheduler for manufacture.

Unfortunately, the instruction to store the information for future
reference got lost somewhere, and for each batch of Freds the relevant "How
to Make" subfile was promptly erased as soon as the Manufacturing Manager
had finished with it. Hence when Factory One had spent some time producing
parts for Factory Two and needed to expand its robot workforce to begin
surveying sites for Factory Three, the Supervisor had to go through the
whole rigmarole again. And the same process was necessary whenever a new
run was scheduled to provide replacements for robots that had broken down
or were wearing out.

All of this took up excessive amounts of processor time, loaded up the
communications channels, and was generally inefficient in the ways that
cost accountants worry about. The alien programers had been suitably
indoctrinated by the alien cost accountants who ran the businessЧ as
alwaysЧand had written the Supervisor as a flexible, self-modifying
learning program that would detect such inefficiencies, grow unhappy about
them, and seek ways to improve things. After a few trials, the Supervisor
found that some of the Freds contained about half their respective
subfiles, which meant that a complete copy could be obtained by
interrogating just two individuals instead of many. Accordingly it made a
note of such "matching pairs" and began selecting them as its source for
repeat requests from the Scheduler, ignoring the others.

Lost along with the original "How to Make a Fred" subfiles were the
subsubfiles on "Programs to Write into a Fred to Start It Up after You've
Made It." To make up for the deficiency, the Supervisor copied through to
the Scheduler the full set of programs that it found already existing in
the Freds selected to provide reproduction information, and these programs,
of course, included the ones on how to make Freds. Thus the robots began
coming off the line with one-half of their "genetic" information
automatically built in, and a cycle asserted itself whereby they in turn
became the source of information to be recombined later for producing more
Freds. The method worked, and the Supervisor never figured out that it
could have saved itself a lot of trouble by storing the blueprints away
once and for all in the factory databank.

The program segments being recombined in this way frequently failed to copy
faithfully, and the "genomes" formed from them were seldom identical, some
having portions of code omitted while others had portions duplicated.
Consequently Freds started taking on strange shapes and behaving in strange
ways.

Some didn't exhibit any behavior at all but simply fell over or failed
during test, to be broken down into parts again and recycled. A lot were
like that.