By Dr. Humanoido - July 2009

• How stamp_ai.bs1 code works
• "Stamp AI gives a living soul to small Stamp microprocessors"

The Stamp SEED Supercomputer is now alive - literally! This is a ten core, ten month project, with the 1st Stamp AI Artificial Intelligence software to fit into a BS1's 256 bytes eeprom - self determinate, evolving, enumerating, dreaming, poetic, noisy, talkative, and downright friendly. It runs on only one program that self evolves differently in each of the ten computers. It's evolutionary - it's revolutionary! Download the source code here

Load stamp_ai.bs1 into all ten computers. Connect to the computer you want to monitor and load the code. Turn off the entire supercomputer when the blue debug screen appears (before any words appear on the screen). Now turn on the supercomputer. The debug screen will show the thinking of the computer it is connect to. This is the viewer. It shows what the life form is thinking and doing. It even shows dreams. All life forms are unique and develop individual personalities.

There is an unseen birthing process that takes place. This is the DNA part of the program, with directives, declarations, and initializations. Then, introduction takes place. Suddenly, evolution begins. The life form looks at pin 1 from which it determines its own unique identity, using a resistor capacitor circuit. Next, the unique identification (self enumerating) is used to determine its computer number and its physical location to know which block it lives on. The supercomputer is divided into ten blocks, computer 1 lives on the lowest block while computer ten lives on the top block (deterministic).

This personal information is committed to memory. There are two memory locations, 0 and 1, designated for the id and computer number. Throughout the life of the entity, this information is remembered and recalled. Now the life form will take a series of naps. The NAP number is 0, which represents 18 milliseconds. In between each nap, there is a dream. Dreams are pseudo random in nature and occur in Vers Libre, a kind of abbreviated poetic verse. Dreams also include numbers and their pseudo random bit representation. Dreams are unique because they are seeded with the unique personal id.

After napping and dreaming, a deep sleep results. The length of sleep is directly related to the life form's computer number. The lower computer number life forms have shorter sleep, while the higher number life forms spend more of their time sleeping. Sleeping can have cause and effect, because in the next waking phase, a life form will talk - call out and speak its personal information to its neighbors. These are the friendly ones. Whether neighbors hear this information depends on whether they are sleeping or awake. The lazy ones will miss the information. In the extreme case, life form 10 sleeps so much that he misses hearing all of his neighbors, and becomes somewhat of a hermit. His memory has little information. Life form one sleeps the least time, and as a consequence, knows all his neighbors and is very friendly. His memory is rich and filled with all the neighbors information.

In the next phase of life, the memories about the neighbors are recalled. All of this appears on the viewer. Thinking and information always appear on the viewer. This is a unique privilege to see the life form's thought process on the screen. No life form is complete without doing some work in life. Each life form will start talking about its computer number, identification, how many seconds it did sleeping, how many neighbors it heard, how many neighbors it missed hearing, and how many dreams it had. These life forms do not live long compare to humans. Their actual lives are approximately one minute long. At the end of a life cycle, hibernation takes place. This is a kind of suspended animation with a heart beat of once every 2.6 seconds. Memories and information are retained but there is no known way to retrieve it in this time era.

Personality galore! You'll find these life forms interesting, unique and with varying personalities. The differences from one to the other include different identifications, different computer numbers, different dreaming, varied sleep times, some are friendly and some don't know any neighbors. Some have filled enriched memories and remember all their neighbors while others can only remember two things and spend all their time sleeping.

The code could have sufficient modification to prevent the life form from dying, and to create an indefinite hibernation in which it can wake up on demand. Instead of and END statement, the code could terminate in a continuous loop. Inside the loop, it looks at a pin status. If the pin goes high, the program can go back to some place in the code for continued function. Another way to preserve the life form's state is discussed in the Stamp SEED Supercomputer Handbook.

Sometimes the life form will become sick and require personal sick leave. The sicknesses are varied. For example, the following maladies are discussed in further detail elsewhere - psychotic breakdown, fitful sleep, sudden death, brain amnesia, unable to resuscitate, alternate identity syndrome, stroke, epileptic pins, and stuttering.

References: More info at Parallax Forum Email: penguin(dot)robot(at)yahoo(dot)com