> At 08:24 PM 7/15/97 -0300, Tom wrote:
Niven's AIs all go insane. They think so fast and get so bored that they soon
generate universes of their own within their own minds... These universes are
so much more interesting to them than our own that they stop paying attention.
Either that they become comatose from the boredom. Either way the result is
the same, time to reboot and rebuild. One of the short stories in the Kzinti
series explores this quite well from the point of view of the AI. Phil P.
> At 04:46 PM 7/15/97, you wrote:
snip
> Phil P.
Like the sentient hyperspace-travelling lifts in The Hitchhikers' Guide
to the Galaxy...
"
> Phillip E. Pournelle wrote:
That sounds like a book...Stepfather Bank by D. C. Poyer. In that book, a
single corporation runs the whole world, having bought out or eliminated all
of the compition long ago. anyway, there is a computer AI in the book which
runs so fast, that 1 second to a human, is like a 1000 years to it. In the few
hours after it had been turned on, it had seen 5 billon years of time, and it
was board silly.
There is another book called: Life Probe and it's sequel: Procyon's Promise.
by Michael McCollum. In these books an anchient race called the Makers, had
sent out sublight probes. They were looking for the solution to the FTL drive
problem. Each probe had an AI. These AI's were pritty stable.
Good Books!
Sorry for the late response -- I'm just getting caught up!
On Thu, Jul 17, 1997 at 10:20:09 PM, Donald Hosford <Hosford.donald@acd.net>
wrote:
> There is another book called: Life Probe and it's sequel: Procyon's
> the Makers, had sent out sublight probes. They were looking for the
McCollum's stuff is available through the website in my sig.
> Christopher Weuve wrote: