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"Fuzzy logic tries to get machines to think like people do, with inexact fuzzy terms."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Automatic Delivery Library | ||
| A library able to deliver any volume within a few moments. |
Everyone with piles of books around the house would really like to have one of these.
| "Knock you cold? Kidnap you? Circus costume?" repeated the dictator, with a puzzled expression. "I do not know those words. They have a very queer antique sound. If you will excuse me, I shall investigate." While his visitors looked on with wide, gaping eyes he pressed a lettered button that stood with hundreds of others on a dial at one end of the room. A few seconds passed in silence; then a panel on the wall rattled open, and a huge volume slid in through a pneumatic tube and arranged itself neatly on a table. "This dictionary isn't exactly up-to-the-minute," remarked Spratt, as he thumbed through the thousands of pages. "It dates back to the late twenty-four twenties. ... Ah, here we are. 'Kidnap. Obsolete. To steal bodily. Refers to a barbarous practice of the Ages of Confusion, no case of which has been known for over three hundred years." |
| Technovelgy from The Lord of Tranerica,
by Stanton A. Coblentz. Published by Dynamic Science Stories in 1939 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the universal dictionary from The Star Beast (1954) by Robert Heinlein and the robot librarian filer from The Robot Who Wanted to Know (1962) by Harry Harrison.
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Automatic Delivery Library-related
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- The Library Of The Future
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| Some Ringworld Configurations Are Stable |
| Darpa 'Defiant' Unmanned Autonomous Ship |
| DNA Printed Book By Isaac Asimov Now Available |
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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
