“Oh.... Well, I was wondering just why you are connected with this project. What does a psychologist have to do with robots? If you’ll pardon my ignorance.”
This time she laughed softly, and Mike thought dizzily of the gay chiming of silver bells. He clamped down firmly on the romantic wanderings of his mind as she started her explanation.
“I’m a specialist in child psychology, Mike. Actually, I was hired as an experiment—or, rather, as the result of a wild guess that happened to work. You see, the first two times Snookums’ brain was activated, the circuits became disoriented.”
“You mean,” said Mike the Angel, “they went nuts.”
She laughed again. “Don’t let Fitz hear you say that. He’ll tell you that ‘the circuits exceeded their optimum randomity limit.’”
Mike grinned, remembering the time he had driven a robot brain daffy by bluffing it at poker. “How did that happen?”
“Well, we don’t know all the details, but it seems to have something to do with the slow recovery rate that’s necessary for learning. Do you know anything about Lagerglocke’s Principle?”
“Fitzhugh mentioned something about it in the briefing we got before take-off. Something about a bit of learning being an inelastic rebound.”
“That’s it. You take a steel ball, for instance, and drop it on a steel plate from a height of three or four feet. It bounces—almost perfect elasticity. The next time you drop it, it does the same thing. It hasn’t learned anything.
“But if you drop a lead ball, it doesn’t bounce as much, and it will flatten at the point of contact. The next time it falls on that flat side, its behavior will be different. It has learned something.”