Zima Blue 齐马蓝 24

Perception, navigation and autonomous problem-solving were the three things that most interested the young man. He had created many robots, tinkering them together from kits, broken toys and spare parts. Their minds if they could be dignified with such a term were cobbled from the innards of junked computers, with their simple programs bulging at the limits of memory and processor speed.

The young man filled his house with these simple machines, designing each for a particular task. One robot was a sticky-limbed spider that climbed around the walls of his house, dusting the frames of pictures. Another lay in wait for flies and cockroaches. It caught and digested them, using the energy from the chemical breakdown of their biomass to drive itself to another place in the house. Another robot busied itself by repainting the walls of the house over and over, so that the colours matched the changing of the seasons. 

Another robot lived in his swimming pool. 

It toiled endlessly up and down and along the ceramic sides of the pool, scrubbing them clean. The young man could have bought a cheap swimming pool cleaner from a mail-order company, but it amused him to design the robot from scratch, according to his own eccentric design principles. He gave the robot a full-colour vision system and a brain large enough to process the visual data into a model of its surroundings. He allowed the robot to make its own decisions about the best strategy for cleaning the pool. He allowed it to choose when it cleaned and when it surfaced to recharge its batteries via the solar panels grouped on its back. He imbued it with a primitive notion of reward. 

感知、导航、自主解决问题的能力是这个年轻人最感兴趣的三个课题。他利用用废旧的工具箱、玩具、零件，组装了很多机器人。这些机器人的头脑——其实根本算不上什么头脑——是在废旧的电脑上运行简单程序，它们的记忆和处理速度实在有限。  

年轻人的屋子里堆满了这些简单的机器，一有业余时间，他就开始捣鼓机器人。其中一个机器人就是一只长了八条粘性长腿的“蜘蛛”，能够在他屋子里的墙上爬来爬去，清扫相框里的灰尘、“蜘蛛”的另外一项功能就是抓苍蝇和蟑螂。它会把抓到的害虫全部消化，把消化产生的化学能作为自己的能源，驱动自己爬向屋子的其他地方。另外一个机器人用来给墙壁刷漆，它会根据季节的变换改变墙壁的颜色。

还有一个机器人住在他的游泳池里。