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"IMHO, having students do computer games projects is absolutely the best possible way to teach programming, graphics, software engineering, object oriented programming, etc."
- Rudy Rucker
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| Pseudopersonalities | ||
| Fragments of distress, playing back in an autonomous robot's brain. |
In his short story "Terminus" (1965) Stanislaw Lem describes an autonomous robot that still carries with him the last moments of a space disaster, which he cannot integrate; the robot cannot help tapping out the distress of the crew in Morse code as he works:
| "What was Terminus, anyway? An electronically wired box. Hell, anything alive, any living creature would have perished long ago in the wreckage. So now what? Rap out a few questions before his glass eyes? And even if he did that, what would he get out of him? Would they—those dead men—give him a neat and coherent narrative of what happened? Or wouldn’t he just hear a lot of screaming and yelling, cries for oxygen, for help. . . . And what was he to tell him? That they didn’t exist? That they were only “pseudopersonalities,” isolated figments of his electronic brain—an illusion, a case of the hiccups? That the terror of those men was a fake terror, that their death struggle, repeated every single night, had as much meaning as a worn-out record?" |
| Technovelgy from Terminus,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Iskry in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Compare to mental phantasmagoria from The Lotus-Engine (1940) by Raymond Z. Gallun.
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
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'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
