Novels2Search
The toy army
Chapter 1: Brobot

Chapter 1: Brobot

Huixlupe was like any other medium-sized Latin American city. With its rich areas and poor areas, with problems in the distribution of wealth and poorly paid jobs or, on the contrary, people with a ridiculously large salary compared to the work done. With problems of corruption, impunity, lack of good administration, or maintenance of facilities. But also, with shelters that were maintained through donations and voluntary work of people, neighborhood organizations, and a halfway decent public transport. A curious event was taking place in a huge two-story house on a three-hectare plot of land. A group of higher education students was writing the last lines of programming for one of several programs that would make up artificial intelligence and a machine producing toy soldiers and parts of other childlike machines. These students were in a workshop of approximately seven by five meters, quite well decorated and clean. The walls were painted a nice pastel blue, with three spotlights and a large window with white curtains, allowing the entire workspace to be well-lit. There were two work desks in that room with different instruments, cables, computers, and of course, the products of such complex and arduous work. A sphere approximately 40 centimeters in diameter, containing complex software that would be responsible for controlling the entire system and following the instructions received through a keyboard, or a microphone. The hardware was composed of a fairly large number of circuits, microprocessors, motherboards, and other electronic components. All covered in several stainless-steel plates that left room to install a modified keyboard, a microphone, and a pair of circular openings for a liquid cooling system. On one side of this sphere is a rectangular tank with a volume of 50 liters of Novec synthetic coolant and a pumping system. The cooling system consists of two main tubes that represent the inlet and outlet of the cooling system. The cooling liquid entered when cold and came out at the top in the form of vapor. This sphere would be the heart and brain of a great project that they had been working on and that consists of an “army of little soldiers” directed by artificial intelligence in order to accomplish different tasks. The little soldiers will be small robots five centimeters high that will be built and controlled by the computer within the sphere. In theory, once the project is completed, the computer will be able to simultaneously control up to 1,000 toy soldiers. On part of one of the tables, there are also prototypes of different vehicles that these little soldiers will be able to use, made of metal parts and quite resistant polymers. This entire project is financed by a wealthy and elderly man who was approaching the end of his life. While most of the money and businesses he had built over the years were managed by his sons, he made use of personal savings that he spent on his own leisure, pleasure, and entertainment. The main reason why he had decided to finance this type of project was because as a child his biggest dream had always been to be the general of an army of little soldiers. In fact, as a child, he had several armies of toy soldiers, but he always had to imagine his adventures and move the soldiers himself, he could never have what he really wanted from this concept: to have an army of toy soldiers that moved by themselves. Although in retrospect the idea sounded stupid and immature, typical of a small child, his desire to have an army of toy soldiers that he could control was never forgotten. When I was a kid there were neither the resources nor a good reason to develop an army of automated toy soldiers. Currently, there was still no good reason to develop automated toy soldiers, but if the resources existed, all that was missing was the will. “Mr. David already gave us a name for the artificial intelligence to respond to,” said one of the programmers. “It would be easier if I just left it as Cortana or Alexa. What was the name he asked for?” replied one of his colleagues. “The artificial intelligence will respond to the name of Brobot.” “Brobot? Well, yes, we can do it.” “There is no guarantee that all algorithms will work correctly on this quantum computer.” “It is not going to do an infinite number of calculations; it is only going to automatically manage robots in the shape of toy soldiers.” When the device was turned on, it did nothing until the first instruction was recorded. The artificial intelligence was asked the number of soldiers detected; its response was 1,052. “Did we do something wrong?” asked one of the engineers in electronics. The programmers also wondered what they did wrong. Until one of them asked how many of the toy soldiers detected were fit to move. Brobot replied that none of the toy soldiers were fit to move. “I didn’t expect this kind of response. It’s not a bad answer, but don’t you think the logic of this artificial intelligence is a bit… I don’t know how to define it! We’ll have to review the patterns it learned with the information it got from the internet.” . . . Greetings readers. As a final note, I would like to tell you that English is not my native language, so if you noticed any mistakes of any kind, I would appreciate it if you would let me know.

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