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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
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| Steel Crocodile | ||
| A boat specialized for swamps on Venus. |
Heinlein has a lot of fun here, designing a swamp boat for another planet.
| Wingate followed him out into warm winter drizzle to the parking lot, where steel crocodiles were drawn up in parallel rows. Van Huysen paused beside a thirty-foot Remington. “Get in.”
The long boxlike body of the crock was stowed to its load line with supplies Van Huysen had purchased at the base. Sprawled on the tarpaulin which covered the cargo were half a dozen men... The man designated gave Wingate a bright nod and moved forward into the operator’s seat. At a wave from Van Huysen, who had seated his bulk in the little sheltered cabin aft, he pulled back on both control levers and the crocodile crawled away, its caterpillar treads clanking and chunking through the mud... Shortly after leaving the outskirts of Adonis, the car slithered down a sloping piece of ground, teetered over a low bank, and splashed loggily into water...
 (Steel Crocodile from 'Logic of Empire' by Robert Heinlein) He had his hands full; the marsh they were traversing looked like solid ground, so heavily was it overgrown with rank vegetation. The crocodile now functioned as a boat, the broad flanges of the treads acting as paddle wheels. The wedge-shaped prow pushed shrubs and marsh grass aside, or struck and ground down small trees. Occasionally the lugs would bite into the mud of a shoal bottom, and, crawling over a bar, return temporarily to the status of a land vehicle...
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| Technovelgy from Logic of Empire,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
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Compare to the ships with legs from Buck Rogers: 2430 AD (1929) by Nowlan and Calkin, the metal monster from The Doom from Planet 4 (1931) by Jack Williamson, the centipede-machine from Monsters of Mars (1931) by Edmond Hamilton, the walker wagon from Farmer in the Sky (1950) by Robert Heinlein, the robass from The Quest for Saint Aquin (1951) by Anthony Boucher, the walking mill from Bread Overhead! (1958) by Fritz Leiber, the centipede from Killing Titan (2015) by Greg Bear and the walking fort from The Killing Machine (1964) by Jack Vance.
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