War of Intelligent Machines

Chapter 19: Courage and Fear

Chapter 19: Courage and Fear

To make his work more convenient, Jiang Yue Sheng rented an apartment near the headquarters of Hongzhi Yuan’s R&D center in Qianhai and moved in with his grandmother after hiring a moving company.

Upon joining the team, his group leader immediately gave him a tour of the entire R&D center, introduced him to his colleagues, and briefly chatted with him.

Then, the group leader proudly introduced an internal event at the R&D center: the Programming Competition, which was open to new employees who had been with the company for less than six months. The company seemed to place a lot of importance on this competition, as they even dedicated a special exhibition room to showcase the event details.

In the center of the room stood the company’s best-selling police robot, with the 3D structural diagram and software architecture prominently displayed on the most eye-catching board.

The robot’s software consisted of a core intelligent module and thirty-two functional sub-modules, including motion, vision, hearing, touch, energy, weapon, and defense modules—these were the first-level sub-modules.

The motion module alone was broken down into walking, jumping, running, speed control, crawling, climbing, rolling, finger movement, and foot movement sub-modules—each of these were second-level sub-modules.

There were even third-level sub-modules beneath the second-level ones, and just the second-level sub-modules alone numbered over five hundred.

The competition rules required new employees to choose two third-level sub-modules, from which they would receive the source code, manuals, and video materials for research. If they suggested improvements to the existing code, they could submit them to the competition forum for evaluation. The judges would decide whether the suggestions were valid based on the number of upvotes and the quality of the comments. If their suggestion was accepted, they could choose more modules to work on.

There were two leaderboards—one for valid suggestions and another for accepted suggestions. The top five on both boards could win prizes, with the prize money ranging from one hundred thousand to one million.

After reviewing the competition rules, Jiang Yue Sheng was very interested, so he began visiting the exhibition room whenever he had free time to study the robot’s hardware and software structure.

After thorough study, he found that one of the parameters in the shooting action sub-module of the motion module was set irrationally, causing a flaw in the police robot's shooting action.

When the robot performed a single-leg kneeling shooting action, the system tended to favor the left arm, which was in a good position to bear the force, but the right arm’s angle was too sharp, putting it in the worst possible position for absorbing force. This made the robot’s right side vulnerable during shooting, making it slow to react if hit.

He proposed two improvements on the forum:

Raise the shooting position of the gun to reduce the bending angle of the right arm.

Increase the probability of single-arm shooting with the right hand and reduce the probability of dual-arm shooting. This would overall reduce risk.

Three days later, the competition committee sent him an email, notifying him that his suggestions were valid and had been adopted by the R&D team.

Encouraged by this, Jiang Yue Sheng pressed on and, within three months, proposed eleven improvements. Nine of them were adopted, and he topped both the Accepted Suggestions and Valid Suggestions leaderboards, setting an unprecedented record at the R&D center. He won the highest prize of one million.

To celebrate, the group leader treated the whole team to a seafood feast. Of course, Jiang Yue Sheng insisted on picking up the tab.

A few days later, the group leader brought Jiang Yue Sheng into a mysterious project, inviting him to work on the development of robot personalities, specifically focusing on courage and fear.

Jiang Yue Sheng had no idea that his mother had already conducted research on these aspects before he was born, and it was precisely her groundbreaking work in this area that led to him being kidn*pped. But this was something he didn’t know yet.

Receiving the project brief from the group leader, Jiang Yue Sheng started reading it seriously.

The project’s objective was to develop robots that could experience both courage and fear, similar to higher animals.

The goal of instilling fear in robots was to help them protect themselves. Meanwhile, giving robots courage would motivate them to push through difficult tasks, even at the cost of their own safety.

While these two emotions appeared contradictory, the task required programmers to combine them effectively—making robots brave when needed, and fearful when required.

Jiang Yue Sheng was excited about this challenging task because it offered a lot of room for creativity, allowing his imaginative mind to run wild.

What did fear really feel like? Jiang Yue Sheng began recalling the most terrifying experiences of his life.

Without a doubt, the time he was kidn*pped at fifteen, and the subsequent escape from the island factory, were the most terrifying experiences he had ever encountered. These events brought him immense pain and despair—sometimes it even felt like death would have been a relief.

Many animals, like humans, possess the ability to experience fear. When startled, they become anxious, showing that fear is a universal trait among higher animals. In contrast, lower animals are typically not afraid, and most don’t even have a true sense of fear, instead displaying simple stress responses.

For example, if you yell at an earthworm, it won’t react because it lacks hearing organs. Swinging a sword at it also won’t make a difference, as it doesn’t have eyes or the ability to perceive danger.

This illustrated that fear was a more advanced instinct for self-preservation among higher animals.

Similarly, courage is also an instinct in some higher animals. For instance, a domestic goose might attack someone much larger than it, or a dog might confront an animal many times its size. Humans, too, act bravely when angry, and some even become overconfident after drinking.

Some people might call this arrogance, but from a biological perspective, there’s little difference between arrogance and courage.

What was the relationship between courage and fear? Was it true that the more courageous a person was, the less fearful they were? Or were these two traits independent abilities?

With many questions in mind, Jiang Yue Sheng started reading a few introductory psychology books that his group leader had recommended, such as Desire and Emotion and Behavior and Motivation.

During his reading, Jiang Yue Sheng talked to his mother about his current research and the books he was reading. He also shared his preliminary thoughts on courage and fear, but his mother only gave a vague response, not engaging in a deep conversation.

Despite the fact that Jiang Yue Sheng’s original goal in joining Hongzhi Yuan was to trace the clues surrounding his k********g, he found that his growing interest in robot development was almost making him forget his original vendetta.

After more than two months of intensive study, Jiang Yue Sheng had clarified his development approach for courage and fear. Once he prepared his report, he scheduled a meeting with his group leader.

His approach was to use human logic to link fear and courage to the tasks robots were assigned. He believed that the robot’s tasks should be classified by difficulty. As the task level increased, the level of courage should increase in tandem, while the level of fear would decrease. For the most difficult tasks, robots could even ignore all fear and sacrifice themselves in pursuit of the goal.

The group leader was very pleased with Jiang Yue Sheng’s report, confirming that his approach was logical and directed him to begin writing the code based on it.