"Nancy Kress - Steamship Soldier on the Information Front" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

slowly and ponderously over the crazed terrain. Each was painted with a bright logo:
"Campbell's Tomorrow Soup," "Chef-Boy-R&D," "Lay's Pareto Chips."
"Programmer humor," Skaka said. "This batch was only activated yesterday. See, they
haven't learned very much about navigation, let alone how to approach their task efficiently."
"What is their task?" Allan said. Now they were getting to the maneuvers not covered in
the prospectus.
"See those green-gray chips scattered throughout the environment? The robots are
supposed to gather as many of those as they can, as fast as they can."
Allan peered through the plastic. Now he could see the chips, each about the size of a
small cookie, lying in holes, on railings, between walkways, under ramps. The closest robot,
Processed Corn, reached for one with its tong-ended "arm." It missed. The chip slid away, and
the robot fell over. Trying to right itself, it thrashed too close to the edge of a large pot hole
and fell in, where it kept on thrashing.
Allan laughed. "'War is hell.'"
"What?" Skaka said.
"Nothing. How many chips have the robots gathered so far?"
"One."
"And how long have they been at it?"
"Six hours. Now come with me to Prime Eight Two."
Allan followed her again. They passed Chef-Boy-R&D and Net-wiser Beer jammed up against
each other. Each time one moved to the right to go around the other, the second robot did
the same. They ended up deadlocked against the plastic wall, four spindly legs marching
futiley against each other.
Skaka unlocked a door and led Allan onto a catwalk overlooking the second enclosure.
Identical to the first, it also contained eight painted robots, this group all motionless.
"Watch," Skaka said.
She pressed a button. A shower of gray-green chips fell from the ceiling, landing in holes,
on railings, between walkways, under ramps. Immediately the robots sprang to life. They
marched, clambered, searched. Allan's watch tingled on his wrist; and his tie twitched. Even
outside the enclosure, his electrical biofield registered the enormous amount of data surging
through the air as the robots communicated with each other. Within minutes all the chips had
been gathered into a pile and shoved through a slit in the enclosure. They fell in a shower
onto the corridor floor.
"Jesus Turing Christ," Allen said, inadequately. "Are you telling me this batch of robots
learned to do that by themselves? That they had no additional programming over the first
biobots?"
"That's what I'm telling you," Skaka said, in triumph. "Six minutes, forty-nine seconds. They
keep beating their own record as they get more and more efficient at the task. This batch has
been learning for five weeks, two days."
"Let me see it again."
Skaka pressed the button to release more chips, which fell onto different places than
before. The eight robots sprang into action. Allan noted that instead of each robot searching
a discrete area of the enclosure, each seemed to go for a chip according to complex factors
of proximity, relative altitude, difficulty of retrieval, and even, it seemed to him, differences in
agility that must have stemmed from the different fetal neurons in their processors. More than
once, he saw a robot start toward a chip, then veer off to go for a different one, while
another robot seized the first chip.
"That's right," Skaka said, eyeing Allan. "They've learned to increase efficiency by sharing
knowledge. And they make cooperative decisions based, according to the mathematical
analyses we've done, on a very detailed knowledge of their differences in capability. And they