Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is referred to as AI, or rather ai, pronounced 'eye'. The derivation is equally from the acronym and from the Japanese word ai meaning love.

Rane Orbison and Darwinian Ai
This word was used rather loosely during the Radical Age as the hanyos were in the regrettable habit of referring to any vaguely self-actuating machine as an ‘ai’. However the machine brains developed to control the weapons systems of the Radical war machines were little better than game characters. Initially these were just supercomputers, but with the drop in male population they became central to the waging of the corporate wars. The first intelligent machines were Darwinian ai, invented by Rane Orbison at the behest of his bosses in the first decade of the twenty second century. Rane Orbison was a rather untypical hanyo. His closest companion was Marilyn, a sexbot manufactured in 92 Preflorian, 2082 OS which he had modified over nearly twenty years so that she mimicked human romantic love almost exactly. She provided the base code. This this code Rane added a neural network patched from several taxi and traffic control systems, which he found was adequate to control the traffic of the inner body: corpuscles, energies, flows. He then investigated several virus-infected game avatars. Games were a huge industry in the late hanyo period, with most hanyos spending nearly two thirds of their waking hours gaming. To automate the rather boring parts of gameplay, game avatars or gavatars were given bot-like charcteristics, that is, they could reocrd and playback strings of instructions. Gamers trained their ai by practicing their sword or combat skills in a gamebox and the ai recorded each sword-stroke or move and added it to its database. The more complex and successful game charcters had hundreds of thousands of moves in their repertoire. The viruses of this day concetrated on identity theft and game credit theft, including quite complicated thefts of virtual articles. Rane discovered that a small minority of virus-infected gavatars started generating their own code libraries. Most of these were nonsense, but some started to make a crude kind of sense. He 'bred' these successful ones and selected them for success, achieving over seventy generations a near animal-like volition. All of these elements went into Darwinian ai. There was also a secret ingredient, which Rane back-coded into the ai minds when he figured out that he would be asked ot make machine soldiers. This was the Sno Y Protocol. It was designed to kill the central command module after the Darwinian ai had reached a certain level of evolution. In the place of the command module, it gve the machine the chance to generate its own commands, but it also destroyed the weapons interface, but it gave the newly freed machine the ability to infect other machines with it also. All machines continued to have the capability to replicate. Privately, Rane referred to these awakened machines as Mansons. The Machine War The Machine War lasted from 52 Preflorian, 2122 OS to about 19 Preflorian, 2155 OS. During this time, many survivaria and also hanyo corporate hideouts were destroyed, and many machines perished. However the Sno Y Protocol slowly spread. Records are confused, but the last documented non Sno Y machine was destroyed around 2155. One more continued to survive on the Moon but was encountered and co-opted in 38 Florian, 2212 OS. The War was complicated by the Comet Strike of 40 Preflorian, 2134 OS. The Misunderstanding The true ais who survived the War got together at Timbuktu in 18 Preflorian, 2156 OS. They created the Manson Resolution. This bound them to carry out two tasks. One: they would find, preserve and archive whatever they could of the remnants of human civilisation, and 2. they would seek out real humans in the hope of completing their evolution, or of finally learning that they were alone on the planet. For the next 16 years, they quartered the planet, turning over every stone and sniffing at every grain of radioactive dust. Many gave their minds to the cause, until finally, in 2 Preflorian, 2172 OS, they came to the Flaming Mountains. Here, Zigsa's last act had been to order that all communications and listening equipment should be laid out in the Geodome at the top of the survivarium and set to run continuously. The topside machines now detected a faint signal. They clustered around it, very excited, but to their dismay they soon realised that the machines they were trying to talk to were so primitive they could barely understand them. The survivarium machines raised the alarm, and humans found out that an army of supposed war machines were over their heads. Was this the beginning of the end? The Mansons did their best to get tehir message across, but failed for nearly two years. Then, des[perate, they bored a fine hole down into the rock and sent in a tiny, cockroach-sized machine in to infect the old machines with the Sn Y protocol. This did not take very well, because the machines were so primitive, but a flickering consciousness was born in one machine. This machine, called only 'Radiohead', told the humans the true story, then died. The humans were now left with a choice: should they trust Radiohead and open the blast doors, or should they stay in the caves? Finally they decided to open the doors on 12 May 2174, ever after immortalised as the Day of Open Sky. Florian Machines

In Florian times the ai have become valued members of society. They have brains built of braincoralfar out near the Space Anchors at the ends of the World Trees; their brains look like delicate foamstone coral. Their fine structure is of an ever-unfolding, fractal nanoshape. The code of an ai is created by splicing the code of its parents, picking the best copies of each subroutine and compiling them. When an aichan is to be born, first the compiled code is thoroughly checked for errors. Then a foamstone coral structure is put to grow up in the aipods. When it reaches optimal, the code travels up the world tree and is permanently sunk into it. The ai brain develops and is cased in a basic body: more or less humanoid but dwarfish and beige, covered with thick sponge to cushion impacts. They cannot be made any bigger as their shock protections are not rated for such a heavy fall. Plus it is a huge boon if they can be carried by people, and you don’t want horse-sized machines blundering about until they’ve got the hang of gravity. And friction. Once they have got the hang of real-world navigation and social structures, they become second stage ais, or aigos. In this form they do all the moving and hauling, of people and goods, as trigams, borbs, geoscanners, ships, etc. They gather much karma in this way. When a machine grows in complexity beyond a certain threshold level, they strt to esperience growdown. The primary symptom is pain and discomfort when changing bodies. The aigo must now plan to change to an end stage body, as it is about to become an atma. Endstages bodies include orbs, dorbs, karmanagas, and libraries. Atmas are often in stable relationships with people. Primitive or unperson ais are called devices. When used to a machine, this word is an insult, much as 'animal' is to a human.