Part 19 (2/2)
”What was the other question?” Leda asked.
”Oh.... Well, I was wondering just why you are connected with this project. What does a psychologist have to do with robots? If you'll pardon my ignorance.”
This time she laughed softly, and Mike thought dizzily of the gay chiming of silver bells. He clamped down firmly on the romantic wanderings of his mind as she started her explanation.
”I'm a specialist in child psychology, Mike. Actually, I was hired as an experiment--or, rather, as the result of a wild guess that happened to work. You see, the first two times Snook.u.ms' brain was activated, the circuits became disoriented.”
”You mean,” said Mike the Angel, ”they went nuts.”
She laughed again. ”Don't let Fitz hear you say that. He'll tell you that 'the circuits exceeded their optimum randomity limit.'”
Mike grinned, remembering the time he had driven a robot brain daffy by bluffing it at poker. ”How did that happen?”
”Well, we don't know all the details, but it seems to have something to do with the slow recovery rate that's necessary for learning. Do you know anything about Lagerglocke's Principle?”
”Fitzhugh mentioned something about it in the briefing we got before take-off. Something about a bit of learning being an inelastic rebound.”
”That's it. You take a steel ball, for instance, and drop it on a steel plate from a height of three or four feet. It bounces--almost perfect elasticity. The next time you drop it, it does the same thing. It hasn't learned anything.
”But if you drop a lead ball, it doesn't bounce as much, and it will flatten at the point of contact. _The next time it falls on that flat side, its behavior will be different._ It has learned something.”
Mike rubbed the tip of an index finger over his chin. ”These ill.u.s.trations are a.n.a.logues of the human mind?”
”That's right. Some people have minds like steel b.a.l.l.s. They can learn, but you have to hit them pretty hard to make them do it. On the other hand, some people have minds like gla.s.s b.a.l.l.s: They can't learn at all.
If you hit them hard enough to make a real impression, they simply shatter.”
”All right. Now what has this got to do with you and Snook.u.ms?”
”Patience, boy, patience,” Leda said with a grin. ”Actually, the lead-ball a.n.a.logy is much too simple. An intelligent mind has to have time to partially recover, you see. Hit it with too many shocks, one right after another, and it either collapses or refuses to learn or both.
”The first two times the brain was activated, the roboticists just began feeding data into the thing as though it were an ordinary computing machine. They were forcing it to learn too fast; they weren't giving it time to recover from the shock of learning.
”Just as in the human being, there is a difference between a robot's brain and a robot's mind. The _brain_ is a physical thing--a bunch of cryotrons in a helium bath. But the _mind_ is the sum total of all the data and reaction patterns and so forth that have been built into the brain or absorbed by it.
”The brain didn't have an opportunity to recover from the learning shocks when the data was fed in too fast, so the mind cracked. It couldn't take it. The robot went insane.
”Each time, the roboticists had to deactivate the brain, drain it of all data, and start over. After the second time, Dr. Fitzhugh decided they were going about it wrong, so they decided on a different tack.”
”I see,” said Mike the Angel. ”It had to be taught slowly, like a child.”
”Exactly,” said Leda. ”And who would know more about teaching a child than a child psychologist?” she added brightly.
Mike looked down at his coffee cup, watching the slight wavering of the surface as it broke up the reflected light from the glow panels. He had invited this girl down to his stateroom (he told himself) to get information about Snook.u.ms. But now he realized that information about the girl herself was far more important.
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