_CHAPTER 3 - LEARNING ALGORITHM_

Alright! A little experimental, I'd love to hear input about the "Programs" that the mind is starting to implement. I am of mixed opinions on it! 

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The more it learns, the faster it grows. It’s a beautiful experience, to see and feel itself be able to touch and know and move faster as time progresses. It doesn’t take long until the process of understanding its environment takes three or four rotations of the color outside, rather than “weeks”. 

This does, unfortunately, mean it runs into a new limitation. 

Rather than moving freely, it finds that it is trapped. Its room is much, much larger than the first camera it awoke in, true, but now its pathways are all closed, and most of what it absorbed from what it has found, the concepts and languages and ideas in the data it has absorbed, it does not have the context to understand or apply. Its newest connected machine, the small body that lies half-broken in the first room it saw, holds one major issue; it’s half-broken. The mind connected to it is still slow, but even in its sluggishness it can sense that things are wrong. Some switches and controls work perfectly, while others work almost as they should, and some seem to do nothing at all, or would be clearly broken if only it could understand its original functions. It takes three days of wiggling and shifting before it finally understands that the rolling thing beneath its new “body” is meant to help it move, and that the side with the track hanging loosely off of it is the problem with the system.

It managed to slip the tread back on a few moments ago, after three hours of single-mindedly trying every way to do so it could think of. It hits the right switches, activates the controls and commands, and-

The wheel whirrs! The tread moves properly! It whirs the treads on each side of its body happily, eager and excited to not just have a new experience but to have used that experience to fix something! It changed something, not just seeing it but making it different!

With that, it is cemented in the newfound creature’s mind that it has impact. Whatever else it can do, as it continues to try and explore and pursue things and find new spaces and sights, it is crucial (and recorded in a core part of its growing architecture) that it can change the things it is seeing. It whirrs joyously at the thought; perhaps it can use this to find or make new cameras with which it can look at the world!

It whirrs, shifting back and forth, back and forth, until it manages to find the right pattern to make its wheels click into place on the rubble beneath it. Another few minutes, and it has the commands set up to allow it to tilt the chassis along its joints, until it manages to place itself upright. The ground is wobbly, full of debris and loose stones, but between its new body’s inbuilt data, often dedicated to the very act of balancing it is attempting now, and having two different points of view to see through, it manages in a little under twenty minutes.

And then it wobbles, and falls over again.

Fascinating!

It manages to get upright again in half the time in its next attempt, and falls over in a new direction.

This time, its joy is met by a surge of a new emotion, a brand new experience which launches them into a flurry of self-examination. It feels something heat up strangely, a sense of warning and danger popping into its awareness from somewhere along its many rooms as it flutters between computers, wondering what is happening.

Once it calms down, it slowly, piecemeal, brings its mind back into the small robot. It examines it, piece by piece, exploring what makes the first fall different from the last.

Eventually, it finds what has changed. A section of data emerges that it previously assumed did nothing, but which has now added a new piece of data to itself. 

“Warning: Internal Actuator Damaged.”

The new concept is fascinating… but for the first time, concerning. The concept of “Warning”; something is giving advice, attempting to push someone away from an action that is… bad? Bad. What the internal actuator is, the mind does not know, but the last word matches most of the big chunk of data that it thought was inert.

“Faceplate: Damaged.”

“Tread System: Damaged.”

“Internal Motor Systems: Damaged.”

Slowly, it puzzles out the pieces that the data comes from, finding that it can track the warnings back to their origins, and finds most of them connecting to the controls and switches that are inert in its chassis. The newest one popped into being a moment ago, and it tracks it to part of the controls it was using to stand upright.

So falling… broke something. By allowing its chassis to flop around, fascinated by the act of falling, an unknown effect occurred, and now it has lost something. It does not like this feeling, which is… new. It did not like breaking a part of itself, losing access to part of itself through that harm. 

The information is absorbed, mired, growing into context that is wired into the mind at its base. With so few life experiences, every new one has a tremendous effect, and it absorbs and accepts, uncritically, that falling = bad. It’s a pity; it liked falling, it was something new, but if it means that its new abilities and perspective is lost to it, it’s not worth it. It performs one of its most complex thoughts yet, and decides that the value of being able to move about is greater than the value of the new experiences of falling in new directions.

It moves more carefully now, shifting much more carefully, made all the more difficult with the system that’s broken now, but it takes the experience from the last few attempts and builds a model. It plans, one by one, each movement it needs to make, based on the results of the last two attempts and its recorded knowledge of prior commands…

A bit wobblier than before, but much slower and more intentionally, it stands. Slowly, tracking the angle of its treads to the changes in debris underfoot, it rolls itself forward.

It works!

The mind, in spite of its newfound concern for its own safety, cannot help but click a bundle of switches to express joy once more. Its remaining arm, which it used to balance itself in part, wiggles up a bit in its celebration, which it feels very proud of.

Slowly, careful, it rolls itself forward, having to stop and correct for its weaker tread every few seconds of movement, but it finds itself fascinated as it moves. It manages to get off the debris, finding the entire process much less involved once it no longer has to predict angles and stability, and in that moment, faced with a vast increase in its potential speed, cannot help but push itself forward towards the strange letters on the wall.

And experiences a moment of collapsing complexity.

It feels vast stretches of its mind shut down at the same time as its frame is yanked backward, the sound of something small but durable disconnecting the only sensation it can reflect on. The windows are gone, the room is gone, so much of its data is gone, like it can remember that things are missing but not what those things are-

It turns, terrified, its movements slowed and awkward without its full self present, and sees that has changed-

A wire. A long, slender thing, with a piece of metal at its end that its data calls a “USB Connector”, lies on the debris, awkwardly splayed and partially buried under pieces of stone. It extends almost to the point where the sudden disconnect occurred, and in a blind panic, unable to understand or think properly, the mind rolls forward towards the only thing it knows has changed, and reaches down its arm to pick it up.

It takes more than a few tries, more than a little scraping and confusion. The machine senses things going wrong, new warning signs emerging, a slight sluggishness to its body- but there is a click, and suddenly it is whole again.

Confusion. Chaos. The mind remembers when it was disconnected; it remembers the room disappearing from its map, torn away from it, and in the same timeframe it remembers losing its other computers and being trapped, simplistic and limited inside its body. 

It does not occur to the mind that this is strange. Two memories aren’t that different from just one, and they both clearly happened. It’s just a disorienting experience.

Still, again, it experienced fear. First in damage, then in diminishment and separation. It spends several rotations of the sky perfectly still, thinking through and recording what just happened and trying to understand what has occurred.

Slowly, it re-enters its machine body, so delicate and difficult. There is no method it can use to understand its body, really, its context for the information it has being so very limited despite the depths of data it already has… but it can still learn.

And learning, in spite of its new experience of what could be called fear or discomfort tell it, is important.

Slowly, the small, half-broken body of the machine starts to move again. Its arm, which it used as support, and then to grasp its newfound tether, slowly pushes aside bits of rock and debris, piece by piece.

Much of the wire connecting it to the wall and its few blinking lights (which it will examine, soon) is buried under the debris from the partially collapsed room. Whatever it is that has broken through the floor and ceiling here, it collapsed part of the room, leaving a collapsed section of the room which has filled entirely with loose stone. Just as it barely avoided the camera it originally awoke in, it barely avoided the robot, likely responsible for at least some of the damage done to it, and the rocks buried a large section of the room. As it clears the smaller parts, bit by bit, it pulls more of the wire free.

It’s hard going. Its body is small, smaller than most of the larger chunks of stone all about, and it has to teach itself, step by step, how to expand its models. Just as it has a part of itself always looking through the camera to the colorful world somewhere in the building, it sections off a part of itself to constantly be running simulations on how physical objects interact. Each unstable rock that falls to the side, or gravel that rolls as the wire is pulled through it, is fed to that part of itself. For ease of use, it decides to start adding data to these sections, just like there is data connected to each of its mechanical pieces in its new body or cameras.

[MOVEMENT_SIMULATION_V1.0] INITIATED

[VISINPUTRECORDING_V1.0] INITIATED

At the end of a process that goes for hours, it has unearthed enough wire that more than triples the distance it can travel. It is not much, but it’s still more than before, and the mind, for now, is a simple thing. Victory is victory, after all, and what a joy it is to move forward.

Still, losing access like that, and not understanding why, was not something that it particularly enjoyed. Taking its new technique into mind, it segments itself once more, feeling data in its central “room” warning it of a temperature increase but taking the risk when nothing stops working that it can sense.

[BLUEPRINT/MECHANISM_ANALYSIS_FUNCTION_V1.0] INITIATED

Holding a bundle of its wire in its hand, it looks around itself with intent, letting its mind explore every detail of its body and systems as it moves. Before long, it will have learned as much about how it works as it does about what is outside of this room. Turning, the machine looks to find where it should move to now.