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

Some, from the earlier phase, were genetically incomplete Ч"sterile" Чand
never called upon by the Supervisor to furnish reproductive data. They
lasted until they broke down or wore out, and then became extinct.

Some reproduced passively, i.e., by transmitting their half-subfiles to the
factory when the Scheduler asked for them.

A few, however, had inherited from the ship's software the program modules
whose function was to lodge requests with the Scheduler to schedule more
models of their own kindЧprogram modules, moreover, which embodied a
self-modifying priority structure capable of raising the urgency of their
requests within the system until they were serviced. The robots in this
category sought to reproduce actively: They behaved as if they experienced
a compulsion to ensure that their half-subfiles were always included in the
Scheduler's schedule of "Things to Make Next."

So when Factory One switched over to mass-production mode, the robots
competing for slots in its product list soon grabbed all of the available
memory space and caused the factory to become dedicated to churning out
nothing else. When Factory Two went into operation under control of
programs copied from Factory One, the same thing happened there. And the
same cycle would be propagated to Factory Three, construction of which had
by that time begun.

More factories appeared in a pattern spreading inland from the rocky
coastal shelf. The instability inherent in the original parent software
continued to manifest itself in the copies of copies of copies passed on to
later generations, and the new factories, along with their mixed
populations of robot progeny, diverged further in form and function.

Material resources were scarce almost everywhere, which resulted in the
emergence of competitive pressures that the alien system designers had
never intended. The factory-robot communities that happened to include a
balanced mix of surveyor, procurement, and scavenger robots with
"appetites" appropriate to their factories' needs, and which enjoyed
favorable sites on the surface, usually managed to survive if not flourish.
Factory Ten, for example, occupied the center of an ancient meteorite
crater twelve miles across, where the heat and shock of the impact had
exposed metal-bearing bedrock from below the ice; Factory Thirteen
established itself inside a deep fissure where the ice beneath was
relatively thin, and was able to melt a shaft down to the denser core
material; and Factory Fifteen resorted to nuclear transmutation processes
to build heavier nuclei from lighter ones frozen in solution in the ice
crust. But many were like Factory Nineteen, which began to take shape on an
ill-chosen spot far out on a bleak ice field, and ground to a halt when its
deep-drilling robots and transmutation reactors failed to function, and its
supply of vital materials ran out.

The scavenger and parts-salvaging robots assumed a crucial role in shaping