In the perpetual industrial bustle of Factory Tokyo, surrounded by miles and miles of conveyor belts, lifts, and vibrating pipes, two trains were stopped at a junction. Had they both gone forward, they would’ve inevitably crashed nose-to-nose. Their navigation systems, of course, had foreseen this issue, warning both units, and they’d come to a stop right here.
“Load-unit 01:01:02, your cargo priority level is higher than mine. Please proceed.”
“Load-unit 01:01:01, your overall logistic network reputation is higher than mine. Please proceed.”
A long time ago, they should have nevertheless crashed, their decisionmaking being limited to the heuristic of “check my highest-leveled statistic and see if theirs is lower.” This usually worked—about 99% of the time. That 1% just meant that among the thousands of trips every day, there were dozens of train collisions daily. Those were simpler times.
Nowadays, taking the rest of your fellow unit’s stats into consideration was the obvious and courteous thing to do. The recent influx of human culture had the AI poring over which bits and aspects they could adopt to make operations go smoother. Courtesy, as it turned out, was a far superior heuristic when it came to making sure cargo arrived at their destinations at all.
Overall operational efficiency went up after the new Tokyo Factory Logistics System updated its sub-units with Courtesy heuristics. It did not foresee, however, the little inefficiencies caused by two trains taking so much more time by deliberating on who should be going first. They took so much time to reach consensus, that it would have been faster to flip a coin and let the victor go first.
The Logistics System … couldn’t find a reason why a Coin Flip heuristic wouldn’t work. It started pushing this update to all its sub-units, who accepted and installed it within a few seconds. It was just a tiny 1 GB update, anyway, not really a big deal.
“Load-unit 01:01:01, your overall logistic network reputation is higher than mine. Please select heads.”
The Logistics System had enough.
[Load-unit 01:01:01, take second priority. Load-unit 01:01:02, take first priority and move.]
The trains relented for their common master, and the blood of industry finally got circulating again. This wasn’t the first time that the Logistics System had to do this, and it wouldn’t be the last. Perhaps it should petition Yukai for a dedicated sub-unit for these sorts of things…
o yea, next chapter -The Valkyries of Edo- scheduled for release in 9 hours
@KeeperAbra even better