DAY 6 9:32 A.M.
It was, I thought, a problem no one had ever imagined before. In all the years that I had been programming agents, the focus had been on getting them to interact in a way that produced useful results. It never occurred to us that there might be a larger control issue, or a question of independence. Because it simply couldn’t happen. Individual agents were too small to be self-powered; they had to get their energy from some external source, such as a supplied electrical or microwave field. All you had to do was turn off the field, and the agents died. The swarm1 was no more difficult to control than a household appliance, like a kitchen blender. Flip2 the power off and it went dead.
But Ricky was telling me this cloud had been self-sustaining for days. That just didn’t make sense. “Where is it getting power?”
He sighed. “We built the units with a small piezo wafer to generate current from photons. It’s only supplementary—we added it as an afterthought—but they seem to be managing with it alone.”
“So the units are solar-powered,” I said.
“Right.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“The Pentagon asked for it.”
“And you built in capacitance?”
“Yeah. They can store charge for three hours.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. Now we were getting somewhere. “So they have enough power for three hours. What happens at night?”
“At night, they presumably lose power after three hours of darkness.”
“And then the cloud falls apart?”
“Yes.”
“And the individual units drop to the ground?”
“Presumably, yes.”
“Can’t you take control of them then?”
“We could,” Ricky said, “if we could find them. We go out every night, looking. But we can never find them.”
“You’ve built in markers?”
“Yes, sure. Every single unit has a fluorescing module3 in the shell. They show up blue-green under UV light.”
“So you go out at night looking for a patch of desert that glows blue-green.”
“Right. And so far, we haven’t found it.”
That didn’t really surprise me. If the cloud collapsed4 tightly, it would form a clump6 about six inches in diameter on the desert floor. And it was a big desert out there. They could easily miss it, night after night.
But as I thought about it, there was another aspect that didn’t make sense. Once the cloud fell to the ground—once the individual units lost power—then the cloud had no organization. It could be scattered7 by wind, like so many dust particles, never to re-form. But evidently that didn’t happen. The units didn’t scatter8. Instead, the cloud returned day after day. Why was that?
“We think,” Ricky said, “that it may hide at night.”
“Hide?”
“Yeah. We think it goes to some protected area, maybe an overhang, or a hole in the ground, something like that.”
I pointed9 to the cloud as it swirled11 toward us. “You think that swarm is capable of hiding?”
“I think it’s capable of adapting. In fact, I know it is.” He sighed. “Anyway, it’s more than just one swarm, Jack12.”
“There’s more than one?”
“There’s at least three. Maybe more, by now.”
I felt a momentary13 blankness, a kind of sleepy gray confusion that washed over me. I suddenly couldn’t think, I couldn’t put it together. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying it reproduces, Jack,” he said. “The fucking swarm reproduces.” The camera now showed a ground-level view of the dust cloud as it swirled toward us. But as I watched, I realized it wasn’t swirling14 like a dust devil. Instead, the particles were twisting one way, then another, in a kind of sinuous15 movement.
They were definitely swarming16.
“Swarming” was a term for the behavior of certain social insects like ants or bees, which swarmed17 whenever the hive moved to a new site. A cloud of bees will fly in one direction and then another, forming a dark river in the air. The swarm might halt and cling to a tree for perhaps an hour, perhaps overnight, before continuing onward18. Eventually the bees settled on a new location for their hive, and stopped swarming.
In recent years, programmers had written programs that modeled this insect behavior. Swarm-intelligence algorithms had become an important tool in computer programming. To programmers, a swarm meant a population of computer agents that acted together to solve a problem by distributed intelligence. Swarming became a popular way to organize agents to work together. There were professional organizations and conferences devoted19 entirely20 to swarm-intelligence programs. Lately it had become a kind of default solution—if you couldn’t code anything more inventive, you made your agents swarm.
But as I watched, I could see this cloud was not swarming in any ordinary sense. The sinuous back-and-forth motion seemed to be only part of its movement. There was also a rhythmic21 expansion and contraction22, a pulse, almost like breathing. And intermittently23, the cloud seemed to thin out, and rise higher, then to collapse5 down, and become more squat24. These changes occurred continuously, but in a repeating rhythm—or rather a series of superimposed rhythms. “Shit,” Ricky said. “I don’t see the others. And I know it’s not alone.” He pressed the radio again. “Vince? You see any others?”
“No, Ricky.”
“Where are the others? Guys? Speak to me.”
Radios crackled all over the facility. Bobby Lembeck: “Ricky, it’s alone.”
“It can’t be alone.”
Mae Chang: “Ricky, nothing else is registering out there.”
“Just one swarm, Ricky.” That was David Brooks25.
“It can’t be alone!” Ricky was gripping the radio so tightly his fingers were white. He pressed the button. “Vince? Take the PPI up to seven.”
“You sure?”
“Do it.”
“Well, all right, if you really think—”
“Just skip the fucking commentary, and do it!”
Ricky was talking about increasing the positive pressure inside the building to seven pounds per square inch. All clean facilities maintained a positive pressure so that outside dust particles could not enter from any leak; they would be blown outward by the escaping air. But one or two pounds was enough to maintain that. Seven pounds of positive pressure was a lot. It was unnecessary to keep out passive particles.
But of course these particles weren’t passive.
Watching the cloud swirl10 and undulate as it came closer, I saw that parts of it occasionally caught the sunlight in a way that turned it a shimmering26, iridescent27 silver. Then the color faded, and the swarm became black again. That had to be the piezo panels catching28 the sun. But it clearly demonstrated that the individual microunits were highly mobile, since the entire cloud never turned silver at the same time, but only portions, or bands. “I thought you said the Pentagon was giving up on you, because you couldn’t control this swarm in wind.”
“Right. We couldn’t.”
“But you must have had strong wind in the last few days.”
“Of course. Usually comes up in late afternoon. We had ten knots yesterday.”
“Why wasn’t the swarm blown away?”
“Because it’s figured that one out,” Ricky said gloomily. “It’s adapted to it.”
“How?”
“Keep watching, you’ll probably see it. Whenever the wind gusts29, the swarm sinks, hangs near the ground. Then it rises up again once the wind dies down.”
“This is emergent behavior?”
“Right. Nobody programmed it.” He bit his lip. Was he lying again?
“So you’re telling me it’s learned ...”
“Right, right.”
“How can it learn? The agents have no memory.”
“Uh ... well, that’s a long story,” Ricky said.
“They have memory?”
“Yes, they have memory. Limited. We built it in.” Ricky pressed the button on his radio. “Anybody hear anything?”
The answers came back, crackling in his handset.
“Not yet.”
“Nothing.”
“No sounds?”
“Not yet.”
I said to Ricky, “It makes sounds?”
“We’re not sure. Sometimes it seems like it. We’ve been trying to record it ...” He flicked30 keys on the workstation, quickly shifting the monitor images, making them larger, one after another. He shook his head. “I don’t like this. That thing can’t be alone,” he said. “I want to know where the others are.”
“How do you know there are others?”
“Because there always are.” He chewed his lip tensely as he looked at the monitor. “I wonder what it’s up to now ...”
We didn’t have long to wait. In a few moments, the black swarm had come within a few yards of the building. Abruptly31, it divided in two, and then divided again. Now there were three swarms32, swirling side by side.
“Son of a bitch,” Ricky said. “It was hiding the others inside itself.” He pushed his button again. “Guys, we got all three. And they’re close.”
They were, in fact, too close to be seen by the ground-view camera. Ricky switched to the overhead views. I saw three black clouds, all moving laterally33 along the side of the building. The behavior seemed distinctly purposeful.
“What’re they trying to do?” I said.
“Get inside,” Ricky said.
“Why?”
“You’d have to ask them. But yesterday one of them—”
Suddenly, from a clump of cactus34 near the building, a cottontail rabbit sprinted35 away across the desert floor. Immediately, the three swarms turned and pursued it. Ricky switched the monitor view. We now watched at ground level. The three clouds converged36 on the terrified bunny, which was moving fast, a whitish blur37 on the screen. The clouds swirled after it with surprising speed. The behavior was clear: they were hunting. I felt a moment of irrational38 pride. PREDPREY was working perfectly40! Those swarms might as well be lionesses chasing a gazelle, so purposeful was their behavior. The swarms turned sharply, then split up, cutting off the rabbit’s escape to the left and right. The behavior of the three clouds clearly appeared coordinated41. Now they were closing in. And suddenly one of the swarms sank down, engulfing42 the rabbit. The other two swarms fell on it moments later. The resulting particle cloud was so dense43, it was hard to see the rabbit anymore. Apparently44 it had flipped45 onto its back, because I saw its hind46 legs kicking spasmodically in the air, above the cloud itself.
I said, “They’re killing47 it ...”
“Yeah,” Ricky said, nodding. “That’s right.”
“I thought this was a camera swarm.”
“Yeah, well.”
“How are they killing it?”
“We don’t know, Jack. But it’s fast.”
I frowned. “So you’ve seen this before?”
Ricky hesitated, bit his lip. Didn’t answer me, just stared at the screen.
I said, “Ricky, you’ve seen this before?”
He gave a long sigh. “Yeah. Well, the first time was yesterday. They killed a rattlesnake yesterday.”
I thought, they killed a rattlesnake yesterday. I said, “Jesus, Ricky.” I thought of the men in the helicopter, talking about all the dead animals. I wondered if Ricky was telling me all he knew.
“Yeah.”
The rabbit no longer kicked. A single protruding48 foot trembled with small convulsions, and then was still. The cloud swirled low to the ground around the animal, rising and falling slightly. This continued for almost a minute.
I said, “What’re they doing now?”
Ricky shook his head. “I’m not sure. But they did this before, too.”
“It almost looks like they’re eating it.”
“I know,” Ricky said.
Of course that was absurd. PREDPREY was just a biological analogy. As I watched the pulsing cloud, it occurred to me that this behavior might actually represent a program hang. I couldn’t remember exactly what rules we had written for individual units after the goal was attained49. Real predators50, of course, would eat their prey39, but there was no analogous51 behavior for these micro-robots. So perhaps the cloud was just swirling in confusion. If so, it should start moving again soon.
Usually, when a distributed-intelligence program stalled, it was a temporary phenomenon. Sooner or later, random52 environmental influences would cause enough units to act that they induced all the others to act, too. Then the program would start up again. The units would resume goal seeking.
This behavior was roughly what you saw in a lecture hall, after the lecture was over. The audience milled around for a while, stretching, talking to people close to them, or greeting friends, collecting coats and belongings53. Only a few people left at once, and the main crowd ignored them. But after a certain percentage of the audience had gone, the remaining people would stop milling and begin to leave quickly. It was a kind of focus change. If I was right, then I should see something similar in the behavior of the cloud. The swirls54 should lose their coordinated appearance; there should be ragged55 wisps of particles rising into the air. Only then would the main cloud move.
I glanced at the timeclock in the corner of the monitor. “How long has it been now?”
“About two minutes.”
That wasn’t particularly long for a stall, I thought. At one point when we were writing PREDPREY, we used the computer to simulate coordinated agent behavior. We always restarted after a hang, but finally we decided56 to wait and see if the program was really permanently57 stalled. We found that the program might hang for as long as twelve hours before suddenly kicking off, and coming back to life again. In fact, that behavior interested the neuroscientists because—
“They’re starting,” Ricky said.
And they were. The swarms were beginning to rise up from the dead rabbit. I saw at once that my theory was wrong. There was no raggedness58, no rising wisps. The three clouds rose up together, smoothly59. The behavior seemed entirely nonrandom and controlled. The clouds swirled separately for a moment, then merged60 into one. Sunlight flashed on shimmering silver. The rabbit lay motionless on its side.
And then the swarm moved swiftly away, whooshing61 off into the desert. It shrank toward the horizon. In moments, it was gone.
Ricky was watching me. “What do you think?”
“You’ve got a breakaway robotic nanoswarm. That some idiot made self-powered and self-sustaining.”
“You think we can get it back?”
“No,” I said. “From what I’ve seen, there’s not a chance in hell.”
Ricky sighed, and shook his head.
“But you can certainly get rid of it,” I said. “You can kill it.”
“We can?”
“Absolutely.”
“Really?” His face brightened.
“Absolutely.” And I meant it. I was convinced that Ricky was overstating the problem he faced. He hadn’t thought it through. He hadn’t done all he could do. I was confident that I could destroy the runaway62 swarm quickly. I expected that I’d be done with the whole business by dawn tomorrow—at the very latest. That was how little I understood my adversary63.
收听单词发音 |
1
swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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flip
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| vt.快速翻动；轻抛；轻拍；n.轻抛；adj.轻浮的 | |
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module
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| n.组件，模块，模件；(航天器的)舱 | |
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collapsed
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| adj.倒塌的 | |
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collapse
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| vi.累倒；昏倒；倒塌；塌陷 | |
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clump
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| n.树丛，草丛；vi.用沉重的脚步行走 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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scatter
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| vt.撒，驱散，散开；散布/播；vi.分散，消散 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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swirl
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| v.(使)打漩，(使)涡卷；n.漩涡，螺旋形 | |
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swirled
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| v.旋转，打旋( swirl的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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jack
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| n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克 | |
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momentary
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| adj.片刻的，瞬息的；短暂的 | |
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swirling
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| v.旋转，打旋( swirl的现在分词 ) | |
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sinuous
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| adj.蜿蜒的，迂回的 | |
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swarming
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| 密集( swarm的现在分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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swarmed
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| 密集( swarm的过去式和过去分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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rhythmic
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| adj.有节奏的，有韵律的 | |
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contraction
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| n.缩略词，缩写式，害病 | |
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intermittently
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| adv.间歇地；断断续续 | |
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squat
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| v.蹲坐，蹲下；n.蹲下；adj.矮胖的，粗矮的 | |
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brooks
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| n.小溪( brook的名词复数 ) | |
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shimmering
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| v.闪闪发光，发微光( shimmer的现在分词 ) | |
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iridescent
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| adj.彩虹色的，闪色的 | |
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catching
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| adj.易传染的，有魅力的，迷人的，接住 | |
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gusts
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| 一阵强风( gust的名词复数 )； （怒、笑等的）爆发； （感情的）迸发； 发作 | |
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flicked
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| （尤指用手指或手快速地）轻击( flick的过去式和过去分词 )； （用…）轻挥； （快速地）按开关； 向…笑了一下（或瞥了一眼等） | |
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abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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swarms
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| 蜂群，一大群( swarm的名词复数 ) | |
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laterally
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| ad.横向地；侧面地；旁边地 | |
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cactus
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| n.仙人掌 | |
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sprinted
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| v.短距离疾跑( sprint的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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converged
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| v.（线条、运动的物体等）会于一点( converge的过去式 )；（趋于）相似或相同；人或车辆汇集；聚集 | |
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blur
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| n.模糊不清的事物；vt.使模糊，使看不清楚 | |
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irrational
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| adj.无理性的，失去理性的 | |
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prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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coordinated
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| adj.协调的 | |
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engulfing
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| adj.吞噬的v.吞没，包住( engulf的现在分词 ) | |
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dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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flipped
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| 轻弹( flip的过去式和过去分词 )； 按（开关）； 快速翻转； 急挥 | |
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hind
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| adj.后面的，后部的 | |
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killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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protruding
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| v.（使某物）伸出，（使某物）突出( protrude的现在分词 )；凸 | |
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attained
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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50
predators
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| n.食肉动物( predator的名词复数 )；奴役他人者（尤指在财务或性关系方面） | |
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analogous
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| adj.相似的；类似的 | |
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random
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| adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动 | |
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belongings
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| n.私人物品，私人财物 | |
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swirls
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| n.旋转( swirl的名词复数 )；卷状物；漩涡；尘旋v.旋转，打旋( swirl的第三人称单数 ) | |
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ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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permanently
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| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
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raggedness
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| 破烂，粗糙 | |
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smoothly
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| adv.平滑地，顺利地，流利地，流畅地 | |
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merged
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| （使）混合( merge的过去式和过去分词 )； 相融； 融入； 渐渐消失在某物中 | |
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whooshing
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| v.（使）飞快移动( whoosh的现在分词 ) | |
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runaway
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| n.逃走的人，逃亡，亡命者；adj.逃亡的，逃走的 | |
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adversary
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| adj.敌手，对手 | |
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