West of Nothing

53. Goo-goo Gaw-gaw

Since being set loose in the Hab, the X-Bots had been busy little beavers, alternating between the training tablet and forays into the surrounding landscape where they hunted and studied bugs, prodded and dissected foliage, and rooted around in the dirt.

HotDamn rubbed at bloodshot eyes as he explained his flash-card system. "We picked positions that could be performed by a human using only his arms. For example." He raised his hands into a V position, lowered them to chest level for a T, then dropped them into an inverted-V for an A. "We created just under fifty positions covering the entire alphabet and basic punctuation and numbers. Also, we used some symbols for shortcuts like yes, no and acknowledge."

"How did you get them to make the signs?" Mason asked.

"Very patiently. We displayed a picture of an X-Bot with the front legs graphically manipulated, and we waited for it to mimic it. Then we started substituting the pics for line drawings until it could mimic those too."

"Isn't that hard to do with that many X-Bots at once?" Mason said.

"We picked a star pupil to focus on. Alpha, of course."

"This sounds like basic conditioning," Corny said. "What did you use for a reward system?"

"Video clips at first. It took a real shine to this show called How It's Made, which takes you inside factories to see how products are manufactured. Whenever it got a symbol right, we showed it a few seconds of footage. But once the process was underway, the rewards were no longer necessary."

Impressive, said Gabby. It must have the ability to tune its intrinsic reward system based on long-term objectives.

"The first few positions took it a while to master but it ran through the rest in short order. Once it had the symbols down, we started showing the English letters alongside them. Then—and this is where the rubber meets the road—we showed entire words with pictures. After that, we gave it a clear screen and made the letters appear as it formed them. If it spelled the entire word correctly, the picture would display. Once it had rock down, we did the same for leaf, stick, bird and butterfly."

"Spelling out every letter like that seems inefficient," Doogie said. "Why not assign symbols to common objects like human sign language does?"

"We thought about that but creating a whole new object dictionary from scratch would take time, and we would have had to learn it too. Another advantage to using the alphabet is it's easy to program. Gabby wrote a visual translator that instantly converts the positions into symbols. Once they're digitized, a simple computer font switches them back and forth with English."

"Can it say anything more than rock and bird?" Doogie asked.

"Along with simple objects, we also taught it actions and relative position. We're working on directives now. We showed it a pebble a few feet away and then showed that same pebble in front of the tablet. Then we told it, Bring small stone here."

It understood an implicit reference to itself? Gabby asked.

"You bet it did," HotDamn said. "It took a little while for it to grasp the intent. At first it just went over and stared at the pebble as if it expected it to move on its own. It seemed to give up and went off to explore for a while. But here's the strange thing. When it came back a half hour later, it did it on the first try. It picked up the pebble and put it down right on the very spot."

That's amazing! Gabby wrote. This is the best proof yet that it has the ability to create mental models and run simulations against them. You know what this means? It could have an imagination!

"This seems like a lot of excitement over a go fetch command," Doogie said. "Robots are actually pretty good at that stuff."

Not when the instructions are ambiguous, Gabby said. It had to interpret and contextualize the command in relation to its environment. It achieved all this from first principles just like a human child. Except it only took Alpha a couple days while it takes a human child years.

"What about abstract concepts?" Corny asked.

"As you might expect, that's a bit more difficult," replied HotDamn. "But we're working on it. We showed it a picture of a bird stuck in a cage next to one flying free. We're not sure if it grasps the concept yet, but at this rate we may find out soon. It's already making phrases on its own using new word combinations it hasn't been shown before. Look here."

He brought up some footage of the X-Bot as it rapidly manipulated its front legs. HotDamn hadn't mentioned how fast it was. Fortunately, the translation software had no problem keeping up, the letters appearing on-screen at the speed of a moderately skilled typist. Sometimes a letter would disappear to be replaced by another.

"What just happened?" Mason asked. "One of the letters changed."

"Backspace command," HotDamn said. "It's a symbol we tacked on. The X-Bot hardly ever forgets something, but it does make a lot of typos. They're not random though. It's almost like it's changing its mind about what it's going to say."

No way! Gabby said. More excited text ran across the ticker, but they hardly noticed as the X-Bot signaled out more messages.

Small leaf fall ground.

Bug walk on root. Bird eat bug.

Snake swim in water. Snake go past me. Snake go up bank.

"It's not just combining words and phrases at random," HotDamn said. "Not only do the sentences follow the syntactical rules we taught it but the events it's describing actually took place. Take this one for instance. Can you guess what it's talking about?"

Butterfly fly high in sky. Butterfly fly into sun. Butterfly burn. Butterfly die.

"A butterfly flew into one of the electrified vent grates?"

"That's right. It was a bit gruesome. Its charred body is still stuck to it."

"Has it said anything about what it wants or where it came from?" Skunkworks asked.

"We're still a long way from it being able to write its biography," HotDamn said. "But we're edging closer. At the end of our last training session, it went completely off script and said this." He fast-forwarded to show the X-Bot form a sequence of letters ending in a question symbol. The translation hovered in the air above them.

No see human. Where human go?