File: “Ai’s Progress”

Yesterday, I decided to go back to work.

Well, by work, I mean working on “our daughter,” Ai. The robot. The AI I was coding. Not the body. Not for now.

After months of no help from our sponsoring countries, I’m pretty sure the only people around here are insane. I meet one or two whenever I go for a nice walk around town. They’re nice for conversation, but they’re always pretty boring to me.

I’m probably insane and boring to them, too. But oh well.

Back to Ai. I’ve had enough equipment from my old job at the Robotics Lab downtown for a while now, but I never really wanted to commit to doing anything with it all. Sure, it’s been hooked up and all organized down around our basement and upstairs in our kitchen. But, like, why would I want to go back to work if no one cares? I mean, we didn’t exactly get payment in the traditional sense. Just food coupons to eat out and rewards for good work in the form of more resources to print with or imported commodities. Now, though? Don’t tell anyone, but I’m pretty sure I have unlimited access to the banks for all of Seattle.

There’s a surprisingly low amount of Helium and Platinum considering what we got access to at the lab.

Wait, hold on, my bad. I’m talking about Ai, not the city.

So anyway, using Alice’s GEmS setup to house the quantum computing portions, I’ve once again begun beating my head into a quantum brick wall. Just like before, it’s still super stupid how fiddly chaining those bastards can be. To be honest, I don’t want to go near the hardware if I can help it. I’m just fighting the battles in how I want to manage my custom compiler for this hardware setup versus how I want to then write the quantum coding in relation to what I’m trying to physically get out of those stupid electrons. At least I think they were electrons. I call them qbits. Sadly, I didn’t invent that name. But I would have thought of it even if I hadn’t of seen it before. It’s logical and unintrusive.

Shit, the AI itself.

Right, well. Then. Okay, it’s not going so well. I think I broke it a little. But not too badly.

See, I’ve gone and screwed with how her nodes are set up and stuff. I figured she’d be fine. But when I tried to revert the previous version, a lot of errors kept coming up. I’m not sure what I did on accident but I’m pretty sure I screwed my backups while organizing all the crap I brought over. A little bit of a whoops.

Of course, I do have versions from over a year ago. But that’d be really crappy to revert to.

So I’m currently trying to copy the bits I messed up and sneak in a few adjustments for this current version and pray I don’t have to go back again. Otherwise, I’m going to hate my life.

On the plus side, I’m getting very suspicious that this health booster thing isn’t just a short term kinda thing but a like, very long term one. I might get like, fifty bonus years to deal with this myself. On the minus side, I think the team that we were guinea pigs for might not be around anymore. Their lab was a bit trashed and I’ve not run into anyone that worked there. Hope there aren’t any side-effects I’m about to come across.

I guess I’ll make a new record of when I make some decent progress on Ai.

For now, I’m just trying to get used to thinking of her as a daughter.

It makes it easier to want to do a good job.

Especially without Alice. She’s the one who always pushed me to work hard. Now I have to do that on my own.

Future Notes:

The lab working on the “age-freeze cocktail,” as I like to call it, was indeed abandoned. Still had enough on file and stored away to investigate years later. I even let Alice have a look at it, though that was a very long time ago, now.

As for my work on Ai…well, it’s sort of a never-ending project. She’s better. A lot better. But still, it’s just not right. Ever reach for an infinitesimally close door, but you’re never able to reach it? I’ve looked up an old parable and there’s a general version of the same idea:

A rabbit and a tortoise meet in a forest one day. The rabbit says it can beat the slow reptile in a footrace because it’s got amazing legs that let it bounce half the entire course in one jump. The tortoise takes on the rabbit despite many other animals attempting to dissuade it. But the tortoise says it walks at a respectable foot per hour and the race is only one mile. Apparently, this was supposed to sound good. Yet after the flag goes down, and the rabbit bounds half a mile in one jump, the tortoise doesn’t show signs of anxiety or fear. Bizarrely, the rabbit keeps slacking off after each jump, thinking it’s always in the lead with half a mile distance of safety. But as the race wraps up to the 220th day, the rabbit notices a critical flaw in how it jumps. Suddenly, it can’t keep up with the tortoise because it -can only jump half the remaining distance to the goal-. At some point, the rabbit doesn’t even appear to move a hair as it keeps trying to hop that last hop. In the last minute of the race, the tortoise saunters over the finish line while the rabbit cries out to its creators why it was cursed with such a stupid restriction in movement. The tortoise, full of pride and joy in achieving its goal, asks the rabbit if it had ever tried to reach a goal before. But the rabbit stormed off and played video games like it always did in its free-time. Of course, it never beat a single one.

I took a few liberties in explaining the story because there’s a few that have some similar parts.

Anyway, if you could only go halfway to an end-goal, you’d never get there no matter how big the first jump would be. Try increasing the power to a 1/2 fraction and I’m pretty sure “1” or “undefined” shows up when your computer is sick of your shit.

That’s how I feel Ai and I are right now. So close to the goal I want for her. But I’m just not quite there, yet. And progress has become a crawl.

I miss the days of this memory.