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"You have to budget the number of fuzzy rules you use to control a system. It turns out, you can state the optimality principle in three words: 'patch the bumps.'"
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Banning Gun | ||
| Shoots a pencil heat ray. |
| A Banning gun spat its sizzling heat-ray, drilled Green and ended with a violet-red shower of sparks up on the metal dome-casing.
 (Banning gun heat ray) I saw the running figure heading sternward — and I didn’t miss. My heat-stab went through him, so clean and swift a drilled little hole that, though he was dead, his body of its own momentum seemed to keep on running with buckling legs. |
| Technovelgy from Voyage 13,
by Ray Cummings. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the heat ray from War of the Worlds (1898) by HG Wells, the death-ray from The World Masters (1903) by George Griffiths, the short-wave surgical knife from Boomerang (1953) by Eric Frank Russell, the ray gun from The Black Star Passes (1930) by John W. Campbell, the pencil heat ray from Brigands of the Moon (1930) by Ray Cummings and the flesh gun from The Computer Connection (1974) by Alfred Bester.
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'... they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.'
'... the expressionless face before me was therefore that of the golem-wrestler, Rolem, a creature that could be set for five times the strength of a human being.'
'Waldo put his arms into the primary pair before him; all three pairs, including the secondary pair mounted before the machine, came to life.'
'... the glittering little rocket bolted to the black iron behind him.'
'The slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector...'
'The operation that had transformed half his body... had located the control switchboard in his teeth.'
