chz16

This short story by Andrew Plotkin is featured in System's Twilight, a now-free game I strongly recommend you play if you can get an old Mac emulator going.

The Tale of the Reclaimer

Listen:

The wooden stall was not large, nor was it cleaner or better-kept than the dozen others in that corner of the market. But where the other stalls had bright paint and ribbons to draw an eye or a purse, this one was bare; its only decoration was a splintery shingle, bearing the words "Anything Bought."

"Just bought? Not sold?" Geret began, laughing, as he stepped inside. He faltered for a moment as he passed the threshold; it was dark inside, dimmer than a place ought to have been, with the May sun shining just beyond the open door. But a voice replied, "Yes; I only buy. I enjoy collecting, I fear. An eccentricity."

They're wired up with a sort of redundant code so that if any two of the six wires break, the arm will still work perfectly, so that it's a kind of way of making mechanical things that's immune to at least some kinds of damage or errors.

The trouble with the kind of robots that industrial people use is that: there's a kind of engineering philosophy called "KISS," "keep it simple, stupid," and engineers in the space program and everywhere else are always trying to find the simplest way to do something because they think that will be more reliable because it has fewer parts, but in fact in the long run it's less reliable because each part matters too much.

And so, that's another direction to go which is not being practiced too much, but I'd like to see more people understand that "keep it complicated, stupid" is the right thing to do in the computer age.

-- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind CD-ROM

[This quote is in one of the videos in the Living Room scene, where he describes a remote actuator he built]

	struct LetterNode {
	var isWord = false
	var children: [Character: LetterNode] = [:]

	mutating func insert(var word: String) {
	if word == "" {
	isWord = true
	return
	}