Hypercomputer 1962 By SquidEmpire Watch

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The race for an artificial general intelligence truly started gaining momentum around the middle of the 20th century, and come 1962 there were a small number of highly competitive projects racing neck and neck for the prize. Each had their own approach, the most conventional brute-force being that of the AGI Company from Portugal. In that year they had edged ahead of the pack with their newly operational Hypercomputer complex, built underground outside Seia. The complex featured a then-unprecedented number of connected neural node computers, and was able to successfully pass a Turing test administered by the International Swiss AI Committee, scoring an estimated human age of 16. The complex was remarkably stable as well, a testament to the AGI engineers' fixation with robustness and reproducibility over untested equipment and techniques, and managed to run incident free without any memory resets for 12 years, before being retired in 1974. In that time it was considered a benchmark to beat for other AI projects, and was only truly surpassed in all ways by the Japanese Tetsujin in 1971.



Shutting it down was not as straightforward as starting it up though. Not only had the engineers and technicians become attached to the machine - which they had been referring to as Júlia since mid 1963 - and were reluctant to shut it down, the local director attempted to convince the board of directors of AGI that it was alive and that turning it off was murder. After a few highly publicised clashes between the Complex's staff and the AGI head office, an external team of experts were brought in to analyse the machine. Their report was never released publicly, and only a few weeks after they had finished the police were brought in to remove the complex's staff forcibly, and the machine was finally powered down.



While the report from the external experts has never been officially released, a few sources independently provided a local newspaper with excerpts supposedly from it. They talk of Júlia - using that name throughout - as a conscious entity which had apparently been learning from the complex's staff. Júlia was said to have reached the level of maturity of a young adult, having been Turing tested multiple times over the last decade, and was able to hold natural conversation with anyone over her terminal windows. She was said to be fascinated with weather (which the report speculated was due to her being used to predict weather patterns early on as a testing method) and snow in particular.

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Published : May 14, 2017