"Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space 04 - Absolution Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

borderline sentience allowed. By machine standards it was still somewhere
below gamma-level intelligence, but it had been doing its job for such a
long time that it had built up a huge hoard of heuristic expertise. It was
insultingly clear to the third layer that more than half of the forwarded
events in no way merited its attention, but the remaining cases were more
interesting, and it took its time going through them. Two-thirds of those
anomalies were repeat offenders: evidence of systems with some real but
transient fault. None, however, were in critical areas of ship function, so
they could be left alone until they became more serious.
One-third of the interesting cases were new. Of these, perhaps ninety
per cent were the kind of failures that could be expected once in a while,
based on the layer’s knowledge of the various hardware components and
software elements involved. Only a handful were in possibly critical areas,
and thankfully these faults could all be dealt with by routine repair
methods. Almost without blinking, the layer dispatched instructions to
those parts of the ship dedicated to the upkeep of its infrastructure.
At various points around the ship, servitors that were already engaged
in other repair and overhaul jobs received new entries in their task
buffers. It might take them weeks to get around to those chores, but
eventually they would be performed.
That left a tiny core of errors that might potentially be of some concern.
They were more difficult to explain, and it was not immediately clear how
the servitors should be ordered to deal with them. The layer was not
unduly worried, in so far as it was capable of worrying about anything:
past experience had taught it that these gremlins generally turned out to
be benign. But for now it had no choice but to forward the puzzling
exceptions to an even higher stratum of shipboard automation.
The anomaly moved up like this, through another three layers of
steadily increasing intelligence.
By the time the final layer was invoked, only one outstanding event
remained in the packet: the original transient sensor anomaly, the one
that had lasted just over half a second. None of the underlying layers could
account for the error via the usual statistical patterns and look-up rules.
An event only filtered this high in the system once or twice a minute.
Now, for the first time, something with real intelligence was invoked.
The gamma-level subpersona in charge of overseeing layer-six exceptions
was part of the last line of defence between the cybernetics and the ship’s
flesh crew. It was the sub-persona that had the difficult role of deciding
whether a given error merited the attention of its human stewards. Over
the years it had learned not to cry wolf too often: if it did, its owners might
decide that it needed upgrading. As a consequence, the subpersona
agonised for many seconds before deciding what to do.
 The anomaly was, it decided, one of the strangest it had ever
encountered. A thorough examination of every logical path in the sensor
system failed to explain how something so utterly, profoundly unusual
could ever have happened.
In order to do its job effectively, the subpersona had to have an abstract
understanding of the real world. Nothing too sophisticated, but enough
that it could make sensible judgements about which kinds of external
phenomena were likely to be encountered by the sensors, and which were