(Continued from April 30, 2010)
Thea and I started walking toward the exit and Alphonse, relying on his peripheral vision, followed us. He was audibly uttering, again and again, a technical phrase—as one does for the purpose of increasing comprehension. That was followed by: “Ah, I have got it. I now know what they are trying to say.”
My daughter and I walked leisurely toward Sam’s shed with my young friend about ten steps behind us. We did not go right up to the imposing structure because an enormous tree threw its shade on and all around the shed. We preferred waiting in the sunshine until aunt Dorothy arrived, which would be within minutes as we observed her exiting from the main house.
After the outside door had swung open, we entered into a small antechamber where a second solid door barred our way. Aunt Dorothy opened that one with a numerical code. The wrong code would set off a siren.
For those of us who had never before entered the robots’ dwelling place, two white circles caught our attention first. Sam occupied the one on the right; the one on the left was empty. When aunt Dorothy flicked on a second light, a workbench took on prominence. It stretched all along one wall and many parts and tools were scattered on its surface.
As she pointed at the oil-covered items, aunt said, with a laugh: “That used to be Agnes. She was one of our first prototypes. Compared to Sam, who appeared on the scene less than a year later, Agnes was quite clumsy. Seeing that the designers’ workshop did not want her back, the guard dismantled her. He reasoned: ‘If I can learn something about the way her different parts interact, I may be able to transfer that knowledge to running Sam more easily.’ The CTO at the workshop didn’t think that the guard would gain much transferable wisdom in the process; but, he admired his enthusiasm for wanting to make Sam function as well as possible.”
“As you pointed out, Agnes was not at all satisfactory from an engineer’s point of view,” Alphonse responded. “Therefore, the technicians probably had a few brainstorming sessions and they decided to abandon completely the method they had previously employed. Their trial-and-error experience had taught them that an entirely new procedure was necessary.”
“That is an excellent assessment,” a broadly smiling aunt Dorothy asserted. “It sounds eerily similar to what the CTO told the board at the time.”
“Judging by clever Sam, I would say that their new direction is a success,” I observed. “And, I am really looking forward to seeing his even more advanced cousins in action.”
(To be continued)