He looked at the microcryotron stack in his hand. It was a one-hundred-kilounit stack. The possible connections within it were factorial one hundred thousand. All it needed was to be immersed in its bath of liquid helium to make the metals superconducting, and it would be ready to go to work.
A friend of his who worked for Computer Corporation of Earth had built a robot once, using just such a stack. The robot was designed to play poker. He had fed in all the rules of play and added all the data from Oesterveldt’s On Poker. It took Mike the Angel exactly one hour to figure out how to beat it.
As long as Mike played rationally, the machine had a slight edge, since it had a perfect memory and could compute faster than Mike could. But it would not, could not learn how to bluff. As soon as Mike started bluffing, the robot went into a tizzy.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if the robot had known nothing whatever about bluffing. That would have made it easy for Mike. All he’d have had to do was keep on feeding in chips until the robot folded.
But the robot did know about bluffing. The trouble is that bluffing is essentially illogical, and the robot had no rules whatsoever to go by to judge whether Mike was bluffing or not. It finally decided to make its decisions by chance, judging by Mike’s past performance at bluffing. When it did, Mike quit bluffing and cleaned it out fast.
That caused such utter confusion in the random circuits that Mike’s friend had had to spend a week cleaning up the robot’s little mind.
But what would be the purpose of building a brain as gigantic as the one in Cargo Hold One? And why build a spaceship around it?
Like a pig roasting on an automatic spit, the problem kept turning over and over in Mike’s mind. And, like the roasting pig, the time eventually came when it was done.
Once it is set in operation, a properly operating robot brain can neither be shut off nor dismantled. Not, that is, unless you want to lose all of the data and processes you’ve fed into it.
Now, suppose the Computer Corporation of Earth had built a giant-sized brain. (Never mind why—just suppose.) And suppose they wanted to take it off Earth, but didn’t want to lose all the data that had been pumped into it. (Again, never mind why—just suppose.)