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69-704: This is the first book to describe the Starways Congress, a high standpoint legislature for the human space colonies, and the Hundred Worlds, the planets with human colonies that are tightly intertwined by Ansible technology, which enables instantaneous communication across any distance. Like Ender's Game , the book won the Nebula Award (1986) and the Hugo Award (1987). Speaker for the Dead

138-581: A loss function . Variants of gradient descent are commonly used to train neural networks. Another type of local search is evolutionary computation , which aims to iteratively improve a set of candidate solutions by "mutating" and "recombining" them, selecting only the fittest to survive each generation. Distributed search processes can coordinate via swarm intelligence algorithms. Two popular swarm algorithms used in search are particle swarm optimization (inspired by bird flocking ) and ant colony optimization (inspired by ant trails ). Formal logic

207-475: A "degree of truth" between 0 and 1. It can therefore handle propositions that are vague and partially true. Non-monotonic logics , including logic programming with negation as failure , are designed to handle default reasoning . Other specialized versions of logic have been developed to describe many complex domains. Many problems in AI (including in reasoning, planning, learning, perception, and robotics) require

276-512: A Speaker five days after sending it. In the intervening time, Libo died in the same manner as Pipo, and Marcos succumbed to a chronic illness. Novinha's eldest children, Ela and Miro, have requested a Speaker for Libo and Marcos. Ender, gaining access to all of the appropriate files, learns of tension since Pipo's death: Novinha has turned away from xenobiology to study crop growth and had a loveless abusive relationship with Marcos; Miro has secretly worked with Libo's daughter Ouanda to continue to study

345-420: A category of fictional devices or a technology capable of near-instantaneous or faster-than-light communication . It can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance or obstacle whatsoever with no delay, even between star-systems. As a name for such a device, the word "ansible" first appeared in a 1966 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin . Since that time, the term has been broadly used in

414-460: A contradiction from premises that include the negation of the problem to be solved. Inference in both Horn clause logic and first-order logic is undecidable , and therefore intractable . However, backward reasoning with Horn clauses, which underpins computation in the logic programming language Prolog , is Turing complete . Moreover, its efficiency is competitive with computation in other symbolic programming languages. Fuzzy logic assigns

483-405: A fictional subatomic particle, the philote. The two quarks inside a pi meson can be separated by an arbitrary distance, while remaining connected by "philotic rays". This concept is similar to quantum teleportation due to entanglement ; however, in reality, quark confinement prevents quarks from being separated by any observable distance. Card's version of the ansible was also featured in

552-406: A new in-universe name for one: "In an ftl universe, you have several levels. I've you can travel hyperfast, but no radio signal can outstrip your ship. Therefore you have to carry the mail with you. It's like the way things were between Europe and America before the laying of the successful transatlantic cable. But once it was laid, messages could be sent long before a ship could make the passage. That

621-429: A path to a target goal, a process called means-ends analysis . Simple exhaustive searches are rarely sufficient for most real-world problems: the search space (the number of places to search) quickly grows to astronomical numbers . The result is a search that is too slow or never completes. " Heuristics " or "rules of thumb" can help prioritize choices that are more likely to reach a goal. Adversarial search

690-423: A threat by the Starways Congress and restrictions on studying them are tightened. Distraught, Novinha makes a call for a Speaker for the Dead for Pipo. She is in love with Libo but fears that if he sees her files of research he will make the same discovery as Pipo and meet the same fate. She marries another colonist, Marcos Ribeira, so as to lock her files from being opened. Andrew Wiggin, unbeknownst by others to be

759-726: A tool that can be used for reasoning (using the Bayesian inference algorithm), learning (using the expectation–maximization algorithm ), planning (using decision networks ) and perception (using dynamic Bayesian networks ). Probabilistic algorithms can also be used for filtering, prediction, smoothing, and finding explanations for streams of data, thus helping perception systems analyze processes that occur over time (e.g., hidden Markov models or Kalman filters ). The simplest AI applications can be divided into two types: classifiers (e.g., "if shiny then diamond"), on one hand, and controllers (e.g., "if diamond then pick up"), on

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828-518: A treatment for the virus before succumbing to it themselves (1936 S.C.), leaving behind their young daughter Novinha. Eight years after the Descolada virus has been brought under control, Xenologer Pipo and his thirteen-year-old son and apprentice Libo have developed a friendship with the Pequeninos. They allow Novinha to join their science team as the colony's only xenobiologist after she passes

897-669: A wide range of techniques, including search and mathematical optimization , formal logic , artificial neural networks , and methods based on statistics , operations research , and economics . AI also draws upon psychology , linguistics , philosophy , neuroscience , and other fields. Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, and the field went through multiple cycles of optimism, followed by periods of disappointment and loss of funding, known as AI winter . Funding and interest vastly increased after 2012 when deep learning outperformed previous AI techniques. This growth accelerated further after 2017 with

966-490: A wide variety of techniques to accomplish the goals above. AI can solve many problems by intelligently searching through many possible solutions. There are two very different kinds of search used in AI: state space search and local search . State space search searches through a tree of possible states to try to find a goal state. For example, planning algorithms search through trees of goals and subgoals, attempting to find

1035-399: A young boy to add needless excitement to the finale. I was impressed by this thoughtful SF adventure, but with reservations ..." AudioFile reviewed the book as "giving life to the emotional and intellectual challenge of the story" and described it as "brilliant and compelling". Publishers Weekly described it as a "rich and ambitious novel" but "overlong". Ansible An ansible is

1104-541: Is Ouanda's half-brother, attempts to escape to the Pequeninos, but he suffers neurological damage after he tries to cross the electrified fence. Ender reveals to the colony what Pipo learned: every life form on Lusitania is paired with another through the Descolada virus, so that the death of one births the other. In the case of the Pequeninos, they become trees when they die. The colony leaders agree to rebel against Congress, severing their Ansible connection and deactivating

1173-1060: Is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs. Some high-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search ); recommendation systems (used by YouTube , Amazon , and Netflix ); interacting via human speech (e.g., Google Assistant , Siri , and Alexa ); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo ); generative and creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT , and AI art ); and superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go ). However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore ." The various subfields of AI research are centered around particular goals and

1242-641: Is a body of knowledge represented in a form that can be used by a program. An ontology is the set of objects, relations, concepts, and properties used by a particular domain of knowledge. Knowledge bases need to represent things such as objects, properties, categories, and relations between objects; situations, events, states, and time; causes and effects; knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what other people know); default reasoning (things that humans assume are true until they are told differently and will remain true even when other facts are changing); and many other aspects and domains of knowledge. Among

1311-459: Is an input, at least one hidden layer of nodes and an output. Each node applies a function and once the weight crosses its specified threshold, the data is transmitted to the next layer. A network is typically called a deep neural network if it has at least 2 hidden layers. Learning algorithms for neural networks use local search to choose the weights that will get the right output for each input during training. The most common training technique

1380-462: Is an interdisciplinary umbrella that comprises systems that recognize, interpret, process, or simulate human feeling, emotion, and mood . For example, some virtual assistants are programmed to speak conversationally or even to banter humorously; it makes them appear more sensitive to the emotional dynamics of human interaction, or to otherwise facilitate human–computer interaction . However, this tends to give naïve users an unrealistic conception of

1449-444: Is an unsolved problem. Knowledge representation and knowledge engineering allow AI programs to answer questions intelligently and make deductions about real-world facts. Formal knowledge representations are used in content-based indexing and retrieval, scene interpretation, clinical decision support, knowledge discovery (mining "interesting" and actionable inferences from large databases ), and other areas. A knowledge base

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1518-422: Is anything that perceives and takes actions in the world. A rational agent has goals or preferences and takes actions to make them happen. In automated planning , the agent has a specific goal. In automated decision-making , the agent has preferences—there are some situations it would prefer to be in, and some situations it is trying to avoid. The decision-making agent assigns a number to each situation (called

1587-413: Is classified based on previous experience. There are many kinds of classifiers in use. The decision tree is the simplest and most widely used symbolic machine learning algorithm. K-nearest neighbor algorithm was the most widely used analogical AI until the mid-1990s, and Kernel methods such as the support vector machine (SVM) displaced k-nearest neighbor in the 1990s. The naive Bayes classifier

1656-482: Is established on the planet Lusitania (1886 S.C.). The planet is home to a sentient species of symbiotic forest dwellers. The colonists (who primarily speak Portuguese) dub them "Pequeninos" (Little Ones) but they are often referred to as "piggies" due to their porcine snouts. Their society is matriarchal and gender-segregated, and their belief system centers around the trees of the forests. The Pequeninos prove to be of great interest to scientists. Since humans had destroyed

1725-413: Is labelled by a solution of the problem and whose leaf nodes are labelled by premises or axioms . In the case of Horn clauses , problem-solving search can be performed by reasoning forwards from the premises or backwards from the problem. In the more general case of the clausal form of first-order logic , resolution is a single, axiom-free rule of inference, in which a problem is solved by proving

1794-469: Is like the ansible universe in which Ursula K. LeGuin‘s early Hainish novels. Since I needed to use exactly that rule set, why not use the word — an excellent word — which I apply in the same way we all say “robot,” an invented word that has entered the language. Thus I paid tribute to the writer from whose works I learned the word." In the universe of the Ender's Game series, the ansible's functions involved

1863-400: Is reportedly the "most widely used learner" at Google, due in part to its scalability. Neural networks are also used as classifiers. An artificial neural network is based on a collection of nodes also known as artificial neurons , which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain. It is trained to recognise patterns; once trained, it can recognise those patterns in fresh data. There

1932-404: Is the process of proving a new statement ( conclusion ) from other statements that are given and assumed to be true (the premises ). Proofs can be structured as proof trees , in which nodes are labelled by sentences, and children nodes are connected to parent nodes by inference rules . Given a problem and a set of premises, problem-solving reduces to searching for a proof tree whose root node

2001-440: Is used for game-playing programs, such as chess or Go. It searches through a tree of possible moves and counter-moves, looking for a winning position. Local search uses mathematical optimization to find a solution to a problem. It begins with some form of guess and refines it incrementally. Gradient descent is a type of local search that optimizes a set of numerical parameters by incrementally adjusting them to minimize

2070-455: Is used for reasoning and knowledge representation . Formal logic comes in two main forms: propositional logic (which operates on statements that are true or false and uses logical connectives such as "and", "or", "not" and "implies") and predicate logic (which also operates on objects, predicates and relations and uses quantifiers such as " Every X is a Y " and "There are some X s that are Y s"). Deductive reasoning in logic

2139-436: Is used in AI programs that make decisions that involve other agents. Machine learning is the study of programs that can improve their performance on a given task automatically. It has been a part of AI from the beginning. There are several kinds of machine learning. Unsupervised learning analyzes a stream of data and finds patterns and makes predictions without any other guidance. Supervised learning requires labeling

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2208-905: Is when the knowledge gained from one problem is applied to a new problem. Deep learning is a type of machine learning that runs inputs through biologically inspired artificial neural networks for all of these types of learning. Computational learning theory can assess learners by computational complexity , by sample complexity (how much data is required), or by other notions of optimization . Natural language processing (NLP) allows programs to read, write and communicate in human languages such as English . Specific problems include speech recognition , speech synthesis , machine translation , information extraction , information retrieval and question answering . Early work, based on Noam Chomsky 's generative grammar and semantic networks , had difficulty with word-sense disambiguation unless restricted to small domains called " micro-worlds " (due to

2277-404: The Descolada virus which, though lethal to humans, appears to serve a beneficial purpose to native lifeforms. When Pipo learns of this, he suddenly has an insight, and before he tells the others, races off to talk to the Pequeninos. Libo and Novinha find Pipo's body cut open just as Rooter's had been, but with no sapling planted. As Pipo's death appears unprovoked, the Pequeninos are now considered

2346-520: The bar exam , SAT test, GRE test, and many other real-world applications. Machine perception is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras, microphones, wireless signals, active lidar , sonar, radar, and tactile sensors ) to deduce aspects of the world. Computer vision is the ability to analyze visual input. The field includes speech recognition , image classification , facial recognition , object recognition , object tracking , and robotic perception . Affective computing

2415-416: The transformer architecture , and by the early 2020s hundreds of billions of dollars were being invested in AI (known as the " AI boom "). The widespread use of AI in the 21st century exposed several unintended consequences and harms in the present and raised concerns about its risks and long-term effects in the future, prompting discussions about regulatory policies to ensure the safety and benefits of

2484-436: The " utility ") that measures how much the agent prefers it. For each possible action, it can calculate the " expected utility ": the utility of all possible outcomes of the action, weighted by the probability that the outcome will occur. It can then choose the action with the maximum expected utility. In classical planning , the agent knows exactly what the effect of any action will be. In most real-world problems, however,

2553-643: The "Dirac Communicator" which first appeared in James Blish 's short story "Beep" (1954) and was later expanded into the novel The Quincunx of Time (1973). Robert A. Heinlein in Time for the Stars (1958) employed instantaneous telepathic communication between identical twin pairs over interstellar distances, and like Le Guin, provided a technical explanation based on a non-Einsteinian principle of simultaneity. In her subsequent works, Le Guin continued to develop

2622-408: The 1991 edition that he has received letters from readers who have conducted "Speakings" at funerals. Dave Langford reviewed Speaker for the Dead for White Dwarf #91, and stated that "Despite token guilt at his genocide of the sensitively named alien 'buggers;' (previous book), Ender never suffers for his triumphs - even though Card is strong on suffering for everyone else, and happily cripples

2691-444: The Dead to be made into a film: " Speaker for the Dead is unfilmable ," Card said in response to a question from the audience. "It consists of talking heads, interrupted by moments of excruciating and unwatchable violence. Now, I admit, there's plenty of unwatchable violence in film, but never attached to my name. Speaker for the Dead , I don't want it to be filmed. I can't imagine it being filmed." Card writes in his introduction to

2760-744: The Ender Wiggin responsible for the Formic xenocide, lives innocuously on the planet Trondheim. He responds to Novinha's call, parting with his sister, Valentine, who had traveled with him but is now settled with a family. He travels with an artificial intelligence named Jane who communicates with Ender through a jewel earring; she was born in the Ansible network that enables faster-than-light communications and keeps her existence secret. After relativistic travel, Ender arrives at Lusitania 22 years later (1970 S.C.), finding that Novinha canceled her request for

2829-454: The Formic war, leading humanity to view Ender Wiggin, previously a hero, as responsible for a tragic and cruel xenocide, ' xeno- ', meaning alien, and '-cide', referring to the act of killing, together meaning the act of killing populations of aliens (comparable to genocide ). Three thousand years after the Formic xenocide, humans have spread across the Hundred Worlds, ruled by Starways Congress. A Brazilian Catholic human colony called Milagre

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2898-469: The Pequeninos are to cohabitate with humans, they must respect this difference. To affirm their understanding and agreement, Ender is asked to perform the ritual of giving Human "third life" as a fathertree. Miro recovers from most of the physical damage from his encounter with the fence, but he is partially paralyzed; Ender transfers Jane to him, and she becomes Miro's companion. Valentine and her family decide to travel from Trondheim to Lusitania to help with

2967-571: The Pequeninos is reported to Congress, Ender secretly meets with the Pequeninos. They know his true identity and they implore him to help them be part of civilization, while the Formic Queen tells Ender that Lusitania would be an ideal place to restart the hive, as her race can help guide the Pequeninos. Congress orders Miro and Ouanda to be sent off-planet for penal action and the colony be disbanded. Ender delivers his eulogy for Marcos, revealing Novinha's infidelity. Miro, distraught to learn that he

3036-711: The Pequeninos, breaking the law to share human technology and knowledge with them. Miro and Ouanda have fallen in love. With Ender's arrival, Miro tells him that one of the Pequeninos, Human, has taken a great interest in Ender, and Ender becomes aware that Human can hear messages from the Formic Hive Queen. Ender discovers that Marcos was infertile: all six of Novinha's children were fathered by Libo. Ender also learns what Pipo had seen in Novinha's data. As word of Miro's and Ouanda's illegal sharing of human technology with

3105-421: The agent can seek information to improve its preferences. Information value theory can be used to weigh the value of exploratory or experimental actions. The space of possible future actions and situations is typically intractably large, so the agents must take actions and evaluate situations while being uncertain of what the outcome will be. A Markov decision process has a transition model that describes

3174-510: The agent may not be certain about the situation they are in (it is "unknown" or "unobservable") and it may not know for certain what will happen after each possible action (it is not "deterministic"). It must choose an action by making a probabilistic guess and then reassess the situation to see if the action worked. In some problems, the agent's preferences may be uncertain, especially if there are other agents or humans involved. These can be learned (e.g., with inverse reinforcement learning ), or

3243-529: The agent to operate with incomplete or uncertain information. AI researchers have devised a number of tools to solve these problems using methods from probability theory and economics. Precise mathematical tools have been developed that analyze how an agent can make choices and plan, using decision theory , decision analysis , and information value theory . These tools include models such as Markov decision processes , dynamic decision networks , game theory and mechanism design . Bayesian networks are

3312-446: The ansible, the name of the device has been borrowed by numerous authors. While Le Guin's ansible was said to communicate "instantaneously", the name has also been adopted for devices capable of communication at finite speeds that are faster than light. David Langford publishes the science fiction fanzine and newsletter Ansible (magazine) Orson Scott Card , in his 1977 novelette and 1985 novel Ender's Game and its sequels , used

3381-648: The common sense knowledge problem ). Margaret Masterman believed that it was meaning and not grammar that was the key to understanding languages, and that thesauri and not dictionaries should be the basis of computational language structure. Modern deep learning techniques for NLP include word embedding (representing words, typically as vectors encoding their meaning), transformers (a deep learning architecture using an attention mechanism), and others. In 2019, generative pre-trained transformer (or "GPT") language models began to generate coherent text, and by 2023, these models were able to get human-level scores on

3450-412: The concept of the ansible: Any ansible may be used to communicate through any other, by setting its coordinates to those of the receiving ansible. They have a limited bandwidth , which only allows for at most a few hundred characters of text to be communicated in any transaction of a dialog session, and are attached to a keyboard and small display to perform text messaging. Since Le Guin's conception of

3519-587: The fence, allowing Ender, Ouanda, and Ela to go with Human to speak to the Pequenino wives, to help establish a case to present to Congress. The Pequenino wives help Ender corroborate the complex life cycle of the Pequeninos, affirming that the death ritual Pipo observed was to help create "fathertrees" who fertilize the Pequenino females to continue their race. The Pequeninos believed they were honoring Pipo, and later Libo, by helping them become fathertrees, but Ender explains that humans lack this "third life", and if

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3588-440: The intelligence of existing computer agents. Moderate successes related to affective computing include textual sentiment analysis and, more recently, multimodal sentiment analysis , wherein AI classifies the affects displayed by a videotaped subject. A machine with artificial general intelligence should be able to solve a wide variety of problems with breadth and versatility similar to human intelligence . AI research uses

3657-537: The late 1980s and 1990s, methods were developed for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics . Many of these algorithms are insufficient for solving large reasoning problems because they experience a "combinatorial explosion": They become exponentially slower as the problems grow. Even humans rarely use the step-by-step deduction that early AI research could model. They solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive judgments. Accurate and efficient reasoning

3726-457: The most difficult problems in knowledge representation are the breadth of commonsense knowledge (the set of atomic facts that the average person knows is enormous); and the sub-symbolic form of most commonsense knowledge (much of what people know is not represented as "facts" or "statements" that they could express verbally). There is also the difficulty of knowledge acquisition , the problem of obtaining knowledge for AI applications. An "agent"

3795-416: The name "ansible" for this type of device (fleshed out with specific details in her fictional works), the broader concept of instantaneous or faster-than-light communication had previously existed in science fiction. Similar communication functions were included in a device called an interocitor in the 1952 novel This Island Earth by Raymond F. Jones , and the 1955 film based on that novel. Also in

3864-518: The now-aged Hegemon of Earth, Peter Wiggin , recognizes Ender's writings in The Hive Queen , and requests Ender write for him once he dies. Ender agrees and authors The Hegemon . These two books, written under the pseudonym "Speaker for the Dead", launch a new spiritual movement of Speakers for the Dead, who have authority to investigate and eulogize a person and their work after their death. The Hive Queen also shifts societal opinion about

3933-752: The only sentient species they had encountered (the Formics), special care is taken to ensure no similar mistakes are made with the Pequeninos. The human colony is fenced in, strictly regulated to limit contact with the Pequeninos to a handful of scientists, and forbidden to share human technology or culture with them. Shortly after the colony's founding, many of the colonists die from the Descolada virus (Portuguese for "uncoiled"), which alters DNA and causes terrible pain, rampant cancerous growth of fungus and even extra limbs, decay of healthy tissue, and death. The xenobiologists Gusto and Cida von Hesse manage to create

4002-405: The other hand. Classifiers are functions that use pattern matching to determine the closest match. They can be fine-tuned based on chosen examples using supervised learning . Each pattern (also called an " observation ") is labeled with a certain predefined class. All the observations combined with their class labels are known as a data set . When a new observation is received, that observation

4071-411: The probability that a particular action will change the state in a particular way and a reward function that supplies the utility of each state and the cost of each action. A policy associates a decision with each possible state. The policy could be calculated (e.g., by iteration ), be heuristic , or it can be learned. Game theory describes the rational behavior of multiple interacting agents and

4140-651: The revolt and will arrive in some decades due to relativistic travel; Ender sends Miro to meet them halfway. Novinha finally absolves herself of her guilt for the death of Pipo and Libo. She and Ender marry. Ender plants the Hive Queen as per her request, and he writes his third book, a biography of the life of the Pequenino Human. At the Los Angeles Times Book Festival on April 20, 2013, Card stated that he did not want Speaker for

4209-471: The technology . The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken into subproblems. These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers expect an intelligent system to display. The traits described below have received the most attention and cover the scope of AI research. Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that humans use when they solve puzzles or make logical deductions . By

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4278-561: The term "ansible" as an unofficial name for the Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator, a machine capable of communicating across infinite distances with no time delay. In Ender's Game , Colonel Graff states that "somebody dredged the name ansible out of an old book somewhere". In an answer on the question-and-answer website Quora , Card explained why he chose to reuse the word "ansible" for an FTL communication device instead of developing

4347-452: The test at age thirteen. After accidentally sharing information about human genders with a male Pequenino named Rooter, the scientists find Rooter's body eviscerated with a sapling planted within it. Guessing this may be a torturous sacrificial ritual, restrictions on studying the Pequeninos are enforced, barring the humans from asking questions directly to Pequeninos. A few years later, Novinha discovers that every lifeform on Lusitania carries

4416-451: The training data with the expected answers, and comes in two main varieties: classification (where the program must learn to predict what category the input belongs in) and regression (where the program must deduce a numeric function based on numeric input). In reinforcement learning , the agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones. The agent learns to choose responses that are classified as "good". Transfer learning

4485-420: The use of particular tools. The traditional goals of AI research include reasoning , knowledge representation , planning , learning , natural language processing , perception, and support for robotics . General intelligence —the ability to complete any task performable by a human on an at least equal level—is among the field's long-term goals. To reach these goals, AI researchers have adapted and integrated

4554-442: The video game Advent Rising , for which Card helped write the story, and in the movie Ender's Game , which was based on the book. Numerous other writers have included faster-than-light communication devices in their fictional works. Notable examples include: Artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence ( AI ), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines , particularly computer systems . It

4623-419: The works of numerous science-fiction authors, across a variety of settings and continuities. A related term is ultrawave . Ursula K. Le Guin coined the word "ansible" in her 1966 novel Rocannon's World . The word was a contraction of "answerable", as the device would allow its users to receive answers to their messages in a reasonable amount of time, even over interstellar distances. The ansible

4692-673: Was published in a slightly revised edition in 1991. It was followed by Xenocide and Children of the Mind . Some years after the eradication of the Formic species (in Ender's Game ), Ender Wiggin writes a book called The Hive Queen , describing the life of the Formics as described to him by the dormant Formic Queen whom he secretly carries. As humanity uses light-speed travel to establish new colonies, Ender and his sister Valentine age slowly through relativistic travel. Ender's older brother,

4761-415: Was the basis for creating a specific kind of interstellar civilization – one where communications between far-flung stars are instantaneous, but humans can only travel at relativistic speeds. Under these conditions, a full-fledged galactic empire is not possible, but there is a looser interstellar organization, in which several of Le Guin's protagonists are involved. Although Le Guin invented

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