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"For the sciences, the way to change science's perception of things is to wait until all the old farts have died off."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Skrode | ||
| A small mobile platform designed for a legless race. |
| Ravna looked across the surf. When the waves backed down the sand, she could see the Skroderiders' fronds peeping out of the spray... They sat in the surf, thinking thoughts that left no imprint on their minds...
Then some unknown race had chanced upon the dreamers and decided to "help them out." Someone had put them on mobile platforms, the skrodes. With wheels they could move along the seashores, could reach and manipulate with their fronds and tendrils. With the skrode's mechanical short-term memory, they could learn fast enough that their new mobility would not kill them... |
| From A Fire Upon The Deep,
by Vernor Vinge. Published by Tor Books in 1992 Additional resources -
|
Skroderiders sometimes performed an action repeatedly; their only short-term memory lay in their skrodes:
When the Riders tried to think on more than one thing at a time, their Skrodes were sometimes unable to maintain short-term memory. Blueshell especially got trapped into cycles of behavior, repeating an action and then immediately forgetting the accomplishment.
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| BMW Plans Fully Autonomous Cars By 2025 |
| EU Parliament Requires Electric Cars To Make Noise |
| Pepper The Parrot's Bird Buggy |
| Tesla Model S Declared Car Of The Year By Motor Trend |
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'When he had first built them, they had been crude indeed, flying mechanisms with little more than a reflex-response unit.'
