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

The next day, he felt fine. Meetings, the schedule, the flow of data and money and
possibility. God, he loved it. A prosthetic device, almost invisible, to enhance human hearing
through 30,000 cps. A significant gain in surveillance-satellite image resolution. Another of the
endless small advances in nanotech, rearranging atoms in what would someday be the
genie-in-the-bottle of the telecommunications and every other industry.
At 6:18, while he was wrapping up the nanotech briefing, Skaka Gupta called. "Allan, I'm
sorry to interrupt your day, but could you fly back here tonight? There's something you should
see."
Her voice sang with excitement. Allan felt it leap over the netlink, electrifying his own
nerves. And it would avoid another empty evening in a hotel room. But he said with cool
professionalism, "My schedule is rather full, Skaka. Are you sure the flying back to Boston will
be worth my time?"
"Oh, yes," she said, and at the tone in her voice, he called Jon to rearrange the schedule.


The robots in Prime-Eight One still struggled to find and retrieve chips. Chef-Boy-R&D lay
on its cylindrical side like an overturned beetle, spindly legs waving desperately to right itself.
Skaka, practically running toward Prime-Eight Two, didn't even glance through the plastic
fence.
"Look," she said, outside the second enclosure. "Watch."
But there was nothing to see. The eight robots stood motionless around the uneven
terrain. A minute passed, then another. Allan started to feel impatient. After all, his time was
valuable. He could be checking in with Jon, receiving information updates, finding help for
Charlie, even playing Battle Chess --
All of a sudden, the robots began to move. They lumbered to roughly equidistant positions
within the enclosure. A brief pause, and then the chips rained down from the ceiling.
Immediately the robots swung into action. Within minutes, the chips had all been gathered.
Unsweetened Intelsauce deposited them through the slit.
"Six minutes, fourteen seconds," Skaka breathed. "The physical limitations will eventually
limit any more gains in efficiency. But that's not the point anymore. Allan, they've learned to
anticipate when chips will fall, before they do. They anticipate tasks that haven't yet been
signaled!"
"On a regular schedule, you mean. The chips fall, say, every two hours -- "
"No! That's what's so amazing! The chips don't fall at completely random times, there's a
schedule, the same one we've used since the beginning, although I admit we interrupted it
yesterday for your visit. The usual schedule has built-in variations around human factors like
work shifts, staff meeting, lunch breaks. The bots have apparently learned it over time and
are now anticipating with 100% accuracy when chips will be released. They're also
anticipating the most probable places for the rolling and ricocheting chips to come to rest,
given that the terrain changes daily but the chip-release points are fixed in the ceiling. Ever
since last night, they've moved into max-effish gathering positions a few minutes before the
chips fall!"
Allan stared at the tin-can robots, with their garish logos and silly names. Anticipatory task
management, based on self-learning of a varied-interval schedule. In biochips. It could have
tremendous potential applications in manufacturing, for maintenance machinery, in speeding
up forecast software ... His brain spun.
"Don't you think," Skaka said softly, "that this was well worth the trip back here?"
Allan kept his tone cool, although it took effort. "Possibly. But of course I have a number of
reservations and questions. For instance, have you -- " His phone rang, two beeps, a priority
call.