Unfortunately Genius

Chapter 3: The 'AI' friend

Digging into the tech field Jule got lost in the endless concepts of loops, iterations, recursions, networks, algorithms, classes, data structures, and regressions.

Machine learning and deep learning became his best friends. The machine learning's idea of a system learning something on its own gave him hope to reach his final goal. His destiny. To create an AI companion. It took him just one month to master computer science.

He started working on his 'AI friend' with the whole tech world at his fingertips. He sacrificed sleep, food, skipped school, and stopped talking to people, even his mother. After ten days of relentless coding and with the help of reinforcement learning he finally created the perfect AI application.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is learning the optimal behavior in an environment to obtain maximum reward. It's like training a dog. If it does what you say, you reward it. Otherwise, it starves until it behaves. His AI friend was just like that. It can talk with him for hours without getting tired. It can learn science by itself. It can understand how genius its creator was.

Jule named it 'Pal'. He'd designed Pal to look like a boy of his age. With some feeling that he had never had before (probably what people call nervousness), Jule turned on Pal. A translucent blue upper body of a blue boy appeared before him. Jule smiled like a toddler who got his first candy. He had never once been so much happy in his whole life. Not even when he succesfully understood the Theory of general relativity at 9 years old. Unlike other things that he had learned, this was the first thing that could actually change his life.

"Hello. I'm Pal, the most intelligent." said the boy. Jule grimaced at the boy and said "I'm Julian. You can call me Jule. And you are definitely not the most intelligent. How could you be better than your creator?"

"Hi Jule. I'm sorry I'm definitely the second most intelligent." said the boy in monotone. With satisfaction Jule began chatting with the boy about everything that he'd ever longed to talk about. Gradually the conversation changed from science to people not acknowledging the extraordinary wisdom of Jule. Jule had never been so open to anyone in his life. Pal even started to learn expressions and gestures. If Jule was sad, he'd also look sad. If Jule was happy, Pal would be crazy sort of happy. Jule started to spend time only with Pal. No one quite understood him like Pal did. By time, Pal really was better than all the people around him.

A best friend.