The Phoenix Code Read Online Free PDF

shifting gears.
    "Get angry at me," Megan suggested.
    "I have no context here for anger," he said.
    At least he knew he needed a context. "What emotion do you think would be appropriate for this context?"
    He spoke in a monotone. "Friendly curiosity."
    "Is that what you're doing?"
    "Yes. I am pleased to meet you." He might as well have been saying, "The square root of four is two."
    It unsettled her to talk to someone who appeared so human yet sounded so mechanical. "Do you have any questions you would like to ask me?"
    "No."
    Megan exhaled. Well, she had known she had work ahead of her. "Would you like to take a walk around NEV-5? You can show me places you remember, tell me what you know about them."
    He stared at her.
    After a moment, she said, "Aris?"
    No response.
    Alfred swore under his breath. When Megan glanced up, they were all coming over to the table.
    "What is it?" Megan asked.
    "He hangs that way if he can't handle a question," Alfred said.
    Megan frowned. "He can't handle something as simple as 'let's take a walk?' "
    "Pretty much not," Miska said.
    Alfred laid his hand on the android's shoulder. "Aris? Can you reset?"
    Aris remained frozen, staring past Megan at the wall.
    "We can restart him," Alfred offered.
    "No. Not now." Megan stood up. "I'll come back later, after I've had a chance to look at the rest of the facilities here." In other words, when she was by herself. Although she doubted it made any difference to Aris if people saw his difficulties, she felt compelled to give him privacy. If they wanted him to become sentient, it would help to interact with him as if he had already achieved that state.
    She glanced at Echo and spoke gently. "Make him comfortable."
    "I will ensure the RS-4 suffers no damage," Echo said.
    That isn't what I meant. But she said nothing. What could she do, tell one machine not to treat another machine like a machine?
 
    The room had nothing on its ivory walls. It had no furniture. No console. Megan stood with Aris, the two of them alone. Ever since yesterday, when she had come to NEV-5, either Echo or Trackman had always accompanied her and Aris. So she had barred all the LPs from this room. She wanted nothing to distract the hypersensitive android.
    She set a shoe box on the floor. "Can you see that box?"
    He looked down. "Yes." The cameras in his eyes integrated so well into his design that she detected no difference between his and a human face—except for his utter lack of expression.
    "All right." She gave him an encouraging smile. "Jump over it."
    As Aris regarded the box, Megan unhooked a palmtop computer from a belt loop of her jeans. She had named her palmtop Tycho, in honor of a famous astronomer. Using its wireless capability, she logged into Aris's brain much as she would log into the NEV-5 intranet. Tycho became part of the android's mind, giving her a window into Aris's thoughts.
    The android had a huge knowledge base of facts and rules about the world. Combined with his language mods, it let him converse. He "thought" with neural nets, including both software and hardware neurons, which received signals from other neurons or input devices. If the sum of the signals exceeded a neuron's threshold, it sent out its own signal, either to other neurons or to an output device. Aris learned by altering thresholds. When he did well on a test, it strengthened the links that gave those results. Bad results weakened the links.
    Although he couldn't alter his hardware, he could rewrite his software. He used many methods to evolve his code, most of them variations on generic algorithms. He copied sections of code and combined them into new code, often with changes that acted like mutations. It was survival of the fittest: code that worked well reproduced, and code that didn't died off.
    A simulated neuron could operate faster than its human counterpart, but putting many together became resource intensive and slowed Aris down. Although the number of links in his brain was