How to Build an Android by David F. Dufty

Author:David F. Dufty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Android Phil before his beard was applied

Grossman asked Hanson about the back of the head. Was he going to cover it up with Frubber skin? Hanson said he would, but other things needed to be done first. He had to put on the beard, eyebrows, and makeup and finish installing the facial motors. Grossman invited Hanson and his girlfriend to stay with him and his wife in Germantown, a quiet outer suburb, east of the city. They had a large house with plenty of spare room, and there was a great Thai restaurant nearby. Evening was approaching and Hanson and Amanda had driven all day, so they left for dinner with Grossman.

* * *

NextFest was due to kick off in less than a week. Time was running out. Hanson and Olney started early the next morning inside Club VALIS in the empty theater, with coffee cups and muffins littered between laptops. They set up the android Phil. His head was mounted on a metal frame that was hidden from view by the body, which Hanson arranged into a human pose, sitting casually on the sofa. The room quickly became a tangle of cords and leads, computers, adapters, and screens. Power cables provided electricity to the motors that acted as Phil’s muscles. A series of wires transmitted commands to the muscles from computers that were installed in the corner. Olney had brought several computers into the room. He needed a bank of three to run the basic android setup, which included several applications, operating in parallel, each with a heavy computational load. The facial recognition and tracking software alone required a dedicated machine.

Until now Olney had been flying blind, writing code for an android he had never seen. He had also installed the face recognition, speech synthesizer, and other modules and connected them to the dialogue software in a network of applications to run the android in real time. He had not once had the opportunity to test his programs to see if they would work on the real thing. It could all go wrong, and making mistakes entailed substantial risks. The software could command the motors to do impossible things or things that would break the machinery, such as telling two motors next to each other to pull the skin in opposite directions, causing the Frubber to tear.

The first step was to establish the acceptable range of movement for each motor. This was done by commanding a single motor at a time to move back and forth, until the limits of what that motor could do without damaging the robot were found. Those limits would then be set in the face-control software Olney had written. With this information they could create a map of the face and its mechanical muscles and then start the next step, which was figuring out how the motors could work in unison to produce emotions without ripping the face apart.

Eva, and Hanson’s previous robots before her, had possessed a limited repertoire of expressions. They were

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