Quint looks a little embarrassed once he's got all the Battons set on their assignments. "Sorry. That's kind of a common phrase back home. It means 'dumb', but in a certain simple AI way. You see, there used to be this program over a century ago called the Logo Turtle. It drew pictures, but you had to tell it how exactly. Like, to draw a square with sides fourty turtle-steps long would be 'forward 40, right 90," and you have to repeat that four times."
"Some drones seem smarter on the surface, and I've even seen some where their AI has developed to where they're more like pets... and a few extremely rare cases that are like people. But most of them? It's turtles, all the way down." His siblings have tried to weed the 'special' ones out of the general drone groups, and find them names and homes, so when sending for a batch like this he doesn't expect to find any smart ones here.
And he might be right... as the drones each start piling up their assigned candies, he notices a Batton contentedly piling up every kind of M&M mixed with Skittles and a few other kinds that are essentially the same shape and sold in a packet. Even though he had them go by visual identification and tried to instruct enough to search for 'variants' to keep from having to have a separate pile for every flavor of lollipop... Oh well. He had to admit they did look the same. "Maybe I should have done searches by printed names on the labels, but then there's the language issue..." He picks up what might be an M&M packet that seems to be labeled in Tolkien Elvish.
no subject
"Some drones seem smarter on the surface, and I've even seen some where their AI has developed to where they're more like pets... and a few extremely rare cases that are like people. But most of them? It's turtles, all the way down." His siblings have tried to weed the 'special' ones out of the general drone groups, and find them names and homes, so when sending for a batch like this he doesn't expect to find any smart ones here.
And he might be right... as the drones each start piling up their assigned candies, he notices a Batton contentedly piling up every kind of M&M mixed with Skittles and a few other kinds that are essentially the same shape and sold in a packet. Even though he had them go by visual identification and tried to instruct enough to search for 'variants' to keep from having to have a separate pile for every flavor of lollipop... Oh well. He had to admit they did look the same. "Maybe I should have done searches by printed names on the labels, but then there's the language issue..." He picks up what might be an M&M packet that seems to be labeled in Tolkien Elvish.