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"You have to budget the number of fuzzy rules you use to control a system. It turns out, you can state the optimality principle in three words: 'patch the bumps.'"
- Bart Kosko

Fusion Sunlight Tube  
  Central light source for a spun cylinder space station.  

Five miles overhead was the fusion sunlight tube, running down the radius of the slightly bulging cylinder that was Farmer's Asteroid. Five miles above the sunlight tube, the sky was a patchwork of small squares, split by a central wedding ring of lake and by tributary rivers...
Technovelgy from At the Bottom of a Hole, by Larry Niven.
Published by Galaxy Magazine in 1966
Additional resources -

Compare to the reflected artificial sun from Revolt on Inferno (1931) by Victor Rousseau, the orbital mirror from Completely Automatic (1941) by Theodore Sturgeon and the Lado-Acheson system from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from At the Bottom of a Hole
  More Ideas and Technology by Larry Niven
  Tech news articles related to At the Bottom of a Hole
  Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven

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