out in front of Bengt. GoMotion had modeled the laws of physics into Leonard’s office, so the little paper clip simmies flew along naturalistic parabolas, bounced on the woodgrain-patterned floor, and skidded to rest.
Bengt had been down on all four wheels pushing his floor buffer, but now he rose up into an alert crouch, balancing easily on his flexed legs. After carefully looking around the room, Bengt wheeled over to stop a few inches from the nearest paper clip and unfolded his pincer-clamp manipulator. Delicately he tweezered up the paper clip and put it in a drawer in his chest. Moving with no wasted motions, Bengt worked his way around the room to pick up all the paper clips before he resumed buffing the floor. The less efficient Studly would have dealt with the paper clips in a one-by-one, piecemeal fashion as his floor polisher bumped into them.
“Right on,” I said. “The improvements are thanks to genetic algorithms and artificial life, Leonard. I think Bengt’s ready for Our American Home.”
After one of our personal robot models could negotiate Leonard’s virtual office, we liked to test it in a full-size simmie-house that we called Our American Home. We had simmies of a family who supposedly lived there: clumsy Walt and Perky Pat Christensen, with son Dexter and daughter Baby Scooter. They all had blond hair and texture- mapped tan skin, and they all bothered the robots in different ways.
Dexter liked to play pranks. He’d tip a robot over onto its back and drag it to the head of the stairs with a blanket over its head. Perky Pat would give the robots contradictory commands, “Now follow me, and stay right where you are. Hurry, dammit!” Baby Scooter was a sullen blob who would nap on the floor, waiting to see if a robot would bump her or nip her so she could scream bloody murder. Sometimes Walt got “drunk,” and Perky Pat got “totally wired,” and they would lurch and spazz around, doing their best to trip over the increasingly wary robot simmie.
The tests in Our American Home were crucial, as the possibility of personal robots injuring someone was the A-number-one factor that had kept them off the open market in the past. Although if there were accidents, GoMotion’s position would be that they were only selling kits and software for the Veep robots-rather than the completed Veeps themselves. If your robot screwed up, it was your fault for having built it. So far this type of defense had held up against people whose Iron Camels had crashed. Our kits came with “no explicit or implied warranty of merchantibility or fitness for a particular purpose.” Even so, the Veeps had to be very safe and very good if they were going to sell well.
My work at GoMotion was to try and use artificial life evolution techniques to improve the programs that controlled the Veep. Once we had the specs for a new prototype, instead of actually building it out of wires and metal, we would generate a simmie of the thing and test it out in cyberspace. Roger Coolidge had been one of the first fully to exploit this great corner-cutting trick. He had used it to design the Iron Camel. Being something of a bullshit artist, in the most Midwestern kind of way, Roger had dubbed his trick “cybercad.”
CAD stood for computer aided design; most architects and engineers were using CAD instead of drafting tools. The idea behind CAD was to draw a three-dimensional computer graphical model of, say, a fan blade before you built it. Someone gave you a blueprint for a fan blade and you made a digital data base which in some sense was the blade. You could generate graphic views of it from every angle, zoom in on its details, take cross sections of it, calculate its weight and volume, etc. Cybercad meant pushing all this a little farther; in cybercad you could pump in virtual air, spin the blade, and measure the net blowage.
The funny thing about the “cyber” prefix was that it had always meant bullshit.
Back in the 1940s, the story went, MIT doubledome Norbert Wiener had wanted a title for a book he’d written about the electronic control of machines. Claude Shannon, also known as The Father Of Information Theory, told Wiener to call his book Cybernetics. The academic justification for the word was that the “cyber” root came from the Greek word for “rudder.” A “kybernetes” was a steersman, or, by extension, a mechanical governor such as a weight-and-pulley feedback device you might hook to your tiller to keep your sailboat aimed at some fixed angle into the wind. The practical justification for the word was contained in Shannon’s advice to Wiener: “Use the word ‘cybernetics,’ Norbert, because nobody knows what it means. This will always put you at an advantage in arguments.”
When I wanted to get a feel for one of our Veep simmies, I would set my viewpoint so that I could see through the robot’s eyes and move its parts with my own hands. I wore the robot-model like a tuxedo, and I drove the robot around in cyberspace houses. No actual robot and no actual house-just an idea for a robot in an idea of a house. I would try and figure out what was right and wrong with the current model. If I noticed a problem with any of the hardware-bad pincer design for instance-I would go into cyberspace and use a Makita Visual Regrammarizer to change the geometry and back-propagate the changes to make a new set of specs.
Once I had a good knowledge of the kinds of things a particular robot could do, I would pull back to try and write software that could drive it around without me being “in” it. And then, I might need to change the simmie to make it work better with the new software. This process would take dozens, scores, hundreds, or even thousands of iterations. The only way to make a profit was to do as much of this as possible in virtual reality. Cybercad!
Even with the use of cybercad, the process still wouldn’t have worked if each iteration involved human judgment-for then it would have taken too long. So GoMotion was using artificial life techniques to make the evolution happen automatically. The way I’d applied this to the Veep was to look at the kinds of changes that the other programmers and I had typically been making to the code. I’d been able to cast our repeated program changes in terms of 1347 different numerical parameters that we were tweaking and re-tweaking. So now the problem of making a good Veep became the problem of finding good values for those 1347 mutually interacting numbers. To do this, Roger and I had run a process of simulated evolution on a population of a few hundred simulated Veeps that we’d installed in a virtual suburb of Our American Homes, each home with a different Veep but the same virtual family consisting of instances of Walt, Perky Pat, Dexter, and Baby Scooter Christensen.
Some of the badly parametrized virtual Veeps did things like get stuck in a corner and buff the floor so long in one place that they made a hole, or wander outside and get lost, or kill everyone in the house and burn the house down. These were parameter sets to get rid of.
Over and over the badly behaving parameter sets were replaced by combinations of the better-behaving sets, and after a quintillion machine instructions had executed we’d gotten a good design. Artificial life!
When GoMotion would get a combination of software and simmie that seemed to work well, they’d order up the parts and build a material prototype of the thing, like Studly.
Rather than keeping a big physical inventory of mechanical and electronic parts, GoMotion used Blackstone Hardware. Blackstone was a cyberspace hardware store with ghostly replicas of all available hardware components on its aethereal and all but endless shelves. All available hardware — from pinhead diodes to prestressed concrete bridge beams, from jackhammers to chip-etching lasers, from rubber washers to superconducting yttrium/iridium whiskers. It cost $1024 an hour to walk around in Blackstone’s, but it was totally worth it. Access time was fast, since you would have a knowledgeable and attentive clerk-simmie at your elbow-and once you found the part you wanted, you told the clerk and Blackstone would express mail it to you on the spot.
The Blackstone clerk had whatever appearance you wanted: clean-cut college boy, overalled graybeard, bikini-clad calendar girl-there were about fifty choices. The clerk was a simmie being run by the Blackstone catalog software, though if you had a complicated question, a person at Blackstone would slip into the clerk simmie and talk through it as if it were his or her own tuxedo. You and your clerk could be visible or invisible to the other shoppers- as you liked. For reasons of industrial security, we at GoMotion always stayed invisible in Blackstone’s, as did most other big companies’ shoppers.
The man who actually built our physical robot models was called Ken Thumb. Ken was a slim blue-collar type; soft-spoken, brilliant, implacable. Before signing on as GoMotion’s machinist he’d worked with the Survival Research Lab art/robotics group putting together big crazy machines out of parts he would find in abandoned factories and warehouses. You’d just about never see Ken in virtual reality. As someone who built real machines out of real parts, he had an irritated contempt for cyberspace.
It was a fact that cybercad designs did not always translate effectively from cyberspace to the machine shop. The cyberspace “physics” was, after all, only a limited model of Nature’s true laws. Actual materials tended to have small nicks, resonant vibrations, casting strains, thermal noises, transient voltages, and various other sources of unexpected chaoticity. This meant that some virtual reality designs failed catastrophically when first incarnated by Ken. After he fixed the design, he would post scathing e-mail messages about what we had to do to bring our specs into line with reality.
“We” in this case was not so much me as it was Dick and Chuck, the thirty-year-old guys who did most of the nitty-gritty coding up of our Veep hardware designs. Dick was the Chief Engineer. He was pretty buttoned-down.
