Building An AI

[Orphen]

Orphen had been spending some time in his workshop in Alderan with his tools and the junk which surrounded him, several interesting pieces of junked technology sitting around him. One of the parts of which had proven to be rather nice, the astromechs which he had attained on Corellea were invaluable, the amount of parts which were crammed into their little shells was something which he found both fascinating, and more than useful, already he had taken apart one of them, having its parts laid out before him in such a manner that he was able to observe them and figure out what he was trying to do, he knew from the very beginning that with his plans to create the drones, he would need something to be able to control them, his first idea was to link it with his HUD, which would be useful, but, with the Visor he had already doing so much, he would find it almost impossible to work the AI into it, as well as a short range transmitter... which was proving to be interesting. His second idea was to incorporate it into his three data-pads, but that sounded way more cumbersome than it needed to be, doing a job three times for something he only had to do once was more than aggravating. It was only then did he think about the third option... his arm. Easily accessible, enough space, not used for much of anything else... it was perfect, but first, he needed to begin to work on the AI... though he had the hardware, he didn't want his Drones to take on the personality and the likeness of an astromech droid, but the R-7 AI that he was working on was a nice start, their self preservation was something which had been somewhat of an issue with the droids themselves, but, in Drone form, with a combat AI backing them up, it would fuel their ability to evade and Maneuver... And so he linked up the hardware to his datapad, and then to a motion sensitive monitor which stood before him, digging into the deeper code of the AI, watching the streaming numbers as he looked through all of the protocols at first... Orphen would need to reduce the size of the memory unit, it would not need to hold anywhere near as much information as a normal astromech droid, but it was going to be gaining some new ones to make up for it...

Looking through, it didn't need any language confirmation other than Galactic basic and maybe trade language, so, immediately he freed up a lot of space with that simple change, removing the copied responses which were duplicated over a hundred times for some of the more commonly used languages in the galaxy, though Orphen kept the written language understanding, so that he would be able to both speak and type commands to these Drones, which would prove handy, what would be even better is if they could have a connection to a neural synapse, but, that would take more work and resources which he had available, more than likely an implant which Orphen was not in the mood for receiving, he had had enough implants to last a life-time, he did not particularly want another one if it could be helped. The next stage was to upload the software which ran through his visor, taking some of the code there for the visual imaging on the HUD and adding it as a function to the AI's control, pairing it with the motor control and the targeting systems so that, when Orphen linked the Visor to the AI, he would be able to literally see the courses the drones were plotting and correct them when need be.

Hours past, as Orphen wrote dozens and dozens of lines of custom code for the AI, taking and editing what combat schematics the Astromech already had, as astro-mechs already had flight patterns and plans already loaded into them, it was a simple edit to be able to make it recognize itself as a flying droid, and engage those flight paths itself. Orphen would keep the AI's ability to self diagnose and adapt to itself, be it from damage, or new and interesting systems, he needed this AI to be able to apply itself to different droids, of different shapes and sizes with different capabilities. The astromech was already pretty well rounded, but what it lacked most of all was any real targeting or combat software, Astromech droids often didn't need to take evasive action, they could run, or fly, but dodging was something which was a little foreign to them.

And so, taking a long and arduous process, Orphen encoded combat movement into the droid, wiping the sweat from his brow as the heat of the day was beginning to get to him, the AI at this point was proving difficult, mostly as he had little to compare it to, at incoming fire, Orphen wanted the droid to react to save itself, but also still be engaged in combat, giving it access to quick moving, strafing, rolling, dipping and climbing to avoid combat, while still retaining an attacking mentality, with the prime objective of eliminating a target. Under fire the AI was to avoid initial impact, a process which would override its attacking directives, in which it was to assess the risk of damage, if the risk was too high, it was to employ combat maneuvers in order to avoid or reduce damage while still following commands, if the damage was assessed to be negligible, and still allow combat functionality, it was to maintain its full offensive directive and continue with its attack, analyzing speed and capable of shooting straight or attempting to intercept movement based on velocity with a basic targeting algorithm written into the optics systems which would already be present in the taken over droids. Following up he imparted melee combat schematics compatable with a variety of weapons which the AI would recognise with its own self analysis, from teath, to claws, to knives and swords, writing systems in place so that if certain conditions were met, the AI would move and function in varying ways in order to make up for the conditions, Ie, lunging deeper with a shorter weapon in order to hit.

The process was a complicated one, but writing the scripts after some pondering began to come naturally, plotting out the signal emission worked and integrated with other droids was something which he found interesting, as a receiver will receive a signal regardless of its intensity, it will simply have guards in place to ensure that the signal does not become the core signal, so, as it receives the signal, a connection is made, making a skilled user able to potentially override the signals being provided to mass control droids, though it would be useless on stand alone models like astromechs and protocol droids, which have their own localized AI housed within them...

looking up from his work for a moment, Orphen realized he'd been at this for almost half a day, knowing he had longer to go, but he wanted to get this done while he could, using his datapad to search commonly perused forums to look for answers for the few questions even he didn't know, AI was something which he had never created before, though, once he began to get the hang of it, it wasn't too hard, it was simply programming and action and reaction, the algorithms in which he practiced his slicing was being applied to the mind of a droid, the only difference was, in the case with the droid, there was so much more foundation work than writing a virus or a hacking spike, in fact Orphen had to ensure that the protection on his unit itself meant that it would not be hacked by other slicers who managed to get in range of the receiver... which attributed Orphen a very useful piece of advice... don't mess with AI programmers in a Slicing war...

Interlacing his fingers Orphen took a small break, deciding to eat something and shower before he continued, using the time to relax and allow his brain to stew on how to approach some of the challenges he had been faced with, though his mind was able to recall and process answers instantly from the information he had already learned, Orphen had to decompress the conflicting information to decide upon a singular coarse of action, he knew that if he were to approach some of the problems from different angles, they would give him different results, but the questions were, which result did he want, Orphen could picture vividly the end result he wanted, did he try to give the AI enough processing power to be able to control up to seven drones at a time, or would he create seven interlocking micro-units to control each drone... one would mean that the less droids he used they would have more power dedicated to them, making their signal more secure, but the other would mean he has a more consistent, but weaker signal... Not being able to resolve the problem, he went back to his work station and simply moved around the issue, not touching that particular question until it was the last thing he needed to do.

As it stood, the combat AI was finished, meaning that all the droids under his control would appear to be intelligent fighters, like most assassin droids, the system was made to be able to identify the schematics of the droids it controlled through pushing the droid/ drone to run a systems analysis, after the analysis was complete, the AI was programmed to create a temporary scheme for that specific droids' parts, which could be deleted or removed through manual command into the control device, this meant that the AI would be able to understand the droid body it was in as well as its capabilities, weapons, movement, etc. The best part was, was most droids tended to be humanoid or flying drones, but, just for kicks, Orphen kept the movement specs for astromech, added one for reptilian, flight/wings, and wheeled mobility, just in case. Meaning that droids/drones which fell into those categories would be able to be controlled by the AI, if they did not, there was a high chance the AI would not be able to move effectively...

Which was a perfectly fine trade off to Orphen...

In the end, Orphen decided to go with his first option, have a single powerful unit which was able to power and control up to seven droids, but, to combat the decline of power spread to the additional drones, he added a small power amplification device, which would ramp up the power consumption the the device, increasing its performance for each Drone it was controlling at the same time, though the processing power amplification needed would not be grand, it would ensure a consistant performance output, without slow reactions to orders while only having a minimal impact on the overall power supply on the bracelet, with about 4 days worth of high use before needing to recharge or have another battery pack placed in, though the telgorn corporation power-pack which fueled the machine would hold up for a long time under moderate or rare use.

Once Orphen was done, he took a step back and looked at the AI he had made, he overlooked it, proofed it, processing the informaiton in his head before layering what he had written as the prime directive, then layering it over the Astromech's base functions filling in the gaps and creating a layered and very intelligently designed machine. All that was left to do now, was design the armlet, which would be easy, some molds, some plating, and upgrading the memory storage with technology up to date with the day and the age would make the space which would be required considerably smaller, fitting easily within the boundaries of a 1/3 of an inch wide magnetically clipped on bracer which projected a motion sensitive grid above itself and sewn it to his firing glove, so that it allways faced the right way... once he was done, he had his DCD (drone control device.)

Booting it up for the first time, the functionality was exactly what he wanted, Orphen was able to customize his own orders and directives for the drones attached to the AI, and in lieu of any orders, they would fall back to a default setting to defend the wearer of the DCD. He was able to target threats as well as have the AI use its own analysis to analyze its own threats and react in accordance with the directives which they had been given. The AI was also able to talk, albiet nowhere near as multi-linguistically as it once was, but making it a companion to some extent, which Orphen thought was awesome... Performing several tests and making certain tweaks as he went on small calibrations, it was finally ready.

and the DCD was made.

AI Functions:

• Good combat movement / evasiveness/ decision making.
• Capable of melee/ ranged combat.
• Functions based on Risk analysis.
• Responsive to a variety of commands from the user.
• Capable of self analysis to adapt to new functions.
• Can store those analysis for second uses.
• Targeting systems.
• Integration compatibility with personal HUD and Data-pad.
• Able to be imparted into/ compatible with Humanoid, reptilian, floating, flying and winged drones/droids.
• Default order is to defend the wearer of the DCD with extreme prejudice,, using the astromechs self preservation directives, targeting based on threat analysis higher than 35% potential lethality.
• Any gaps are filled with basic R-7 Astromech Data.