"01 - Code of the Lifemaker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

had failed to keep up with the times, and the area had become the domain of
Factory Sixty-five. The only trace left of the searcher spacecraft was a
long, rounded depression in the ice beach below, on the shore of the liquid
methane sea.



The alien engineers had designed the system to enjoy full planetary
communications coverage by means of satellites and surface relays, but the
idea hadn't worked too well since nothing had been put into orbit and
surface relays tended not to last very long. This enabled some of the
organisms without strong defenses to remain protected, for a while, from
the more metal-hungry empires by sheer distance. But, to allow for
communications blackouts and interference, the aliens had also provided a
backup method of program and data exchange between robots and factories,
which took the form of direct, physical, electrical interconnection. This
was a much slower process than using radiolinks, naturally, since it
required that the robots travel physically to the factories for
reprograming and reporting, but in a self-sustaining operation far from
home the method was a lot better than nothing. And it kept the accountants
happy by protecting the return on the investment.

With defects and deficiencies of every description appearing somewhere or
other, it was inevitable that some of the organisms would exhibit partial
or total communications breakdowns. Factory Seventy-three, built without
radio facilities, was started up by programs carried overland from
Sixty-six. None of its robots ever used anything but backup mode, and the
factories that it spawned continued the tradition. But this very fact meant
that their operating ranges were extended dramatically.

So the "defect" turned out to be not so much of a defect after all.
Foraging parties were able to roam farther afield, greatly enlarging their
catchment areas, and they frequently picked up as prizes one or more of the
territories previously protected by geographical remoteness. Furthermore,
selective pressures steadily improved the autonomy of the robots that
operated in this fashion. The autodirected types, relying on their
comparatively small, local processors, tended to apply simple solutions to
the problems they encountered, but their close-coupled mode of interaction
with their environment meant that the solutions were applied quickly: They
evolved efficient "reflexes." The teledirected types, by contrast, tied to
the larger but remote central computers, were inclined to attempt more
comprehensive and sophisticated solutions, but —as often as not—too late to
do any good. Autodirection thus conferred a behavioral superiority and
gradually asserted itself as the norm, while teledirection declined and
survived only in a few isolated areas.

The periodic instinct to communicate genetic half-subfiles back to their
factories had long become a universal trait among the robots— there could
be descendants only of ancestors who left descendants—and they responded to
the decline of radio as a means of communication by evolving a compulsion