May 25: If someone mentions the Wachoskis ONE MORE TIME...

[Douglas Decker]

Doug was in the DR, fiddling around with his project, trying to run some high level complex simulations.

He frowned. He NEVER frowned.

[Narrator]

The simulated plaza and the people walking over it looked convincing enough, thanks to the Danger Room.

Their behavior based on Doug's simulation however wasn't exactly stellar. Picking the shortest route between their location and their randomly determined destination meant they constantly bumped into each other.

[Douglas Decker]

"This is basic pathing. Where is this damn bug," he muttered, ripping through lines of code at breakneck speed, trying this and this and that and those.

[Narrator]

It appeared to be a chain-reaction cause by whoever accidentally bumped into someone first. From there on out the pathfinding sub-routines seemed to focus solely on calculating a new path based on the latest collision, bypassing any projections.

[Douglas Decker]

"Damn it. This'll take hours to fix," he sighed, starting to type again.

He didn't dare dive into the computer--not one as well protected as THIS.

[Calvin Strong]

In the meantime, one thing didn't seem to be running into everything. Galatea strolled through the room... well, ran through it with her tiny legs, but that didn't seem to bother her. She was more curious than anything, looking at all the simulations crashing into each other.

[Narrator]

The simulation wasn't exactly laid out for something like that and Galatea left behind a wake of 'people' standing still, caught up in trying to find a pathing routine dealing with something that to the program did not exist. So they stood still and looked after the tiny robot.

[Calvin Strong]

Galatea stopped, looking at the attention she had apparently gathered. Then, happy at the attention, she started waving and chatting with the program... mostly things along the lines of 'Hello, I'm Galatea, that's a pretty projection.'

[Narrator]

Lacking any conversational routines the program does one of the few things it can do to react to the strange input. Though it's learning parameters are limited to movement patterns and basing what it learns on reimplementing what it picks up from collisions and those kind of interactions, so it's response is just a shuffled around version of what Galatea said.

'Hello, that's Galatea, I'm a pretty projection.'

Any actual meaning is likely coincidental.

[Calvin Strong]

Code: Select all

Yes!  I am!  And it is!

Her reply was excited, not that the program could tell. She began skipping through the crowd, liking the attention the program was giving her with all the staring people.

[Narrator]

Code: Select all

"Hello I'm projection is it a yes and that's Galatea."

By now all of the people have stopped while the code is going haywire along Doug going through it.

Code: Select all

"Yes it is! I'm a hello!"

Code: Select all

"Galatea that's and is it."

Code: Select all

"Pretty yes it is, hello!"

Code: Select all

"Projection that's a yes I am!"

Code: Select all

Error: 4372
Insufficient Memory
$§%&0ß2&=%gj²k*#######
Pattern Recognition Failure
Critical Error at position 04202x88190
Exceeding Variable Count
Insufficient Input
Insufficient Input
Insufficient Input
Insufficient Input
.
.

And with that the program started pinging Galatea on every port, whether the little robot was monitoring or even using it or not. A side-effect to that was that the machines the program was running on (namely the powerful Danger Room hardware) started flooding the school network with seemingly non-sense requests with the protocols it had adapted from Galatea. After maybe a second of the Danger Room trying to link up with anything and everything that would answer the room's securities kicked in and with a sudden *Clunk!* the simulation turned off.

[Douglas Decker]

"What th..."