"Greg Egan - Diaspora" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

Some shriekers sent out metronomic bit-streams; others produced pseudorandom stutters. The pulses
flowed through the mazes of construction where the networks were still being formed-where almost
every track was still connected to every other, because no decision to prune had yet been made. Woken
by the traffic, new shapers started up and began to disassemble the excess junctions, preserving only
those where a sufficient number of pulses was arriving simultaneously-choosing, out of all the countless
alternatives, pathways which could operate in synchrony. There were dead ends in the networks-in-
progress, too-but if they were traveled often enough, other shapers noticed, and constructed extensions. It
didn't matter that these first streams of data were meaningless; any kind of signal was enough to help
whittle the lowest-level machinery of thought into existence.
In many polises, new citizens weren't grown at all; they were assembled directly from generic
subsystems. But the Konishi method provided a certain quasi-biological robustness, a certain
seamlessness. Systems grown together, interacting even as they were being formed, resolved most kinds
of potential mismatch themselves, with no need for an external mind-builder to fine-tune all the finished
components to ensure that they didn't clash.
Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out
territory for a few standardized subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels
for incoming data-one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens,
distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the orphan's two-hundredth iteration, the channels
themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for
classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed.
Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred meters beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fiber and
satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from
probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and
oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The first problem of perception
was learning how to choose from this superabundance.
In the orphan psychoblast, the half-formed navigator wired to the controls of the input channels began
issuing a stream of requests for information. The first few thousand requests yielded nothing but a
monotonous stream of error codes; they were incorrectly formed, or referred to non-existent sources of
data. But every psychoblast was innately biased toward finding the polis library (if not, it would have
taken millennia) and the navigator kept trying until it hit on a valid address, and data flooded through the
channels: a gestalt image of a lion, accompanied by the linear word for the animal.
The navigator instantly abandoned trial and error and went into a spasm of repetition, summoning the
same frozen image of the lion again and again. This continued until even the crudest of its embryonic
change discriminators finally stopped firing, and it drifted back toward experimentation.
Gradually, a half-sensible compromise evolved between the orphan's two kinds of proto-curiosity: the
drive to seek out novelty, and the drive to seek out recurring patterns. It browsed the library, learning
how to bring in streams of connected information-sequential images of recorded motion, and then more
abstract chains of cross-references-understanding nothing, but wired to reinforce its own behavior when

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it struck the right balance between coherence and change.
Images and sounds, symbols and equations, flooded through the orphan's classifying networks, leaving
behind, not the fine details-not the spacesuited figure standing on gray-and-white rock against a pitch
black sky; not the calm, naked figure disintegrating beneath a gray swarm of nanomachines--but an
imprint of the simplest regularities, the most common associations. The networks discovered the circle/
sphere: in images of the sun and planets, in iris and pupil, in fallen fruit, in a thousand different
artworks, artifacts, and mathematical diagrams. They discovered the linear word for "person," and hound
it tentatively both to the regularities which defined the gestalt icon for "citizen," and to the features they