[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Two armedArchies entered, followed by two more, and two more after them.Julie aimed her minivid at the new arrivals.After the six armedArchies formed a barrier in front of the door, a seventh Archie squeezedbetween two of the others.This Archie may have been the one they'd seenearlier, because its clothing looked similar, yellow stripes in the material.The Archie brought two things.The first was a transparent bowl of familiarfood pellets, which it set on the floor as though a pet dog were nearby.Inaddition it carried a small box with eight switches on top of it.It set thebox on the floor near the bowl.It moved toward the console, then stopped,apparently waiting for the humans to get out of the way.Abby and the others stepped back, and the Archie used one graceful limb totouch the console switch that let it back out of the information they had beenexploring, and then it chose another area.Eight new icons came up on thescreen.The Archie made a point of pressing one of the wedges slowly enoughfor the humans to see which one it had touched, and the screen changed again.One of the icons looked like the box on the floor.The Archie then backed up and left the room.Two at a time the armed Archiesdeparted until the humans were alone again."What was that all about?" asked Matt."I don't know," Abby said.Rudy picked up the box and they examined it.Each of the eight switches was arotary switch with eight positions.A brief chattering from the console turned their heads back to the screen.Apicture of an Archie came up on the screen.At the same time a chatteringsound like the previous one, but subtly different, came from a speaker on theconsole.The screen changed and showed a top view of an Archie with the twofront limbs highlighted.Another sound came from the speaker."It's language lesson time!" Abby said."I need the computer.And cansomeone set up my minivid and just let it run?"As quickly as she could she readied the computer, and as the sequence ofsounds and images continued, fell into a pattern.Each time the computer produced a snippet of the Archies'language and showed an image, she had the computer record the sound bite andimmediately afterward spoke and recorded her best guess as to what was beingdescribed.After cataloging several snippets, Bobby Joe interrupted to show her what he'ddeduced about how to slow down the flow, or speed it up, or reverse it.Touching the left and right side wedges on the keyboard put the sequence intoforward or reverse, and the distance from the center determined the speed.Abby went back to the beginning and recorded the sound associated with theimage of an Archie.She made no attempt at first to break the collection of words into categoriesor try to deduce anything about speech patterns, phonetics, morphology,semantics, or syntax.Almost every word she heard sounded like the previousthree words.All she could hope to do for a start was build the collection ofsounds linked to human best-guess expressions.Page 162ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlThe sequence of images continued, some of them looking like photographicimages, others looking like artists' conceptions, still others just icons.If she had been studying the individual sounds, trying to replicate them orunderstand them, she'd still have been on the first two or three sounds.Instead, after a couple of hours, she reached the end of the sequence, and hercomputer said it had recorded 884 sets.She leaned back, feeling drained.Bobby Joe pushed another one of the keyboard wedges, and the console spoke fora couple of seconds, probably five or six words strung together."Do that again in just a minute," Abby said, suddenly feeling more energetic.She told the computer to start listening for foreign words in its vocabularyand to play back the English version after each word it found.Seconds after that, Bobby Joe played back the sequence.From Abby's computer came her recorded voice speaking the sentence, "ShipArchies dome human city." Since the intonation on each word was similar, hervoice sounded like a spelling checker.Bobby Joe looked at her and said, "Me smart now."From the corner of her eye, Abby saw Matt give Bobby Joe a come-here signal,and Abby was just able to make out his words asMatt said, "Abby is our best hope of communicating with these guys.Slow herdown and you and I are going to have a little talk."Abby reached forward and triggered another phrase.This time her computersaid, "Ship Archies two human."She shook her head and played more sentences, slowly realizing by analyzingsentence after sentence that earlier she had made a series of small errors,like saying "two" when the symbol probably had meant "with." Each time shewas able to reach a conclusion about a specific word, she went back andchanged her recording and rethought some of her assumptions, as though shewere working a three-D crossword puzzle.She hit an easy stretch, a series ofdots obviously meant to represent numbers--first one dot, then two, then threeand so on, and then the images went back to more difficult ones.A long time later, what seemed like days, she was aware ofMatt standing nearby.She turned to him."I think I'm getting pretty closeto a basic working vocabulary.It's still bound to have errors, but it'sstarting to make sense."She played another Archie sentence, and her computer said, "Mouth Archies boxtwo one three four five six seven eight."Abby looked at the box the Archie had left, and Matt retrieved it."You think it's a combination?" Abby asked."You're the expert.""I think it's a combination.""And if I set the combination on these switches?""Then maybe that's a signal that we're ready to talk.Probably what I thought meant 'mouth' actually means 'talk' or'speak.'""Are we ready?" Matt asked."We're as close as we're going to get for a while longer.I've been using Archie-to-human look-up, but I can also set it tohuman-to-Archie [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]