If Then Or Then If
Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2020 1:28 am
Frost 2, 120
In two days, he'd managed to transcribe the entirety of the teddy's nexus into his notes. Several of the symbols were recognizable on their own, but within their greater strings, it was difficult to know whether they were simple commands or those involving more complex logic. Ifs and thens and only whens were never as straight forward as they should have been. Coupled with the fact that the runes themselves only really had approximate translations into any language, Foma could have easily attributed vague interpretations to the vast majority of the code and probably been more or less correct, at least within the microcosm of the teddy golem's code.
Unfortunately, the entire point of the teddy golem's existence was for him to learn as precisely as he could the intended meanings behind not only the symbols themselves, which he was already fairly familiar with given his year of intensive study but their exact relationships within the strings as they appeared.
There was a particular string he was currently focused on, something that seemed more back-end and unrelated to most of what the teddy golem actually did. It contained symbols that more or less spelled out a command to process commands that weren't explicitly spelled out within its code and, through what he could only assume was a process of very quick internal analysis, determine the next best and closest equivalent of what it was being told. For example, he'd already translated the most basic of the primary commands: "wake up, teddy" being what was written and presumably intended. However, upon further testing, he'd found that a plethora of variable brought about the same functional command of "activate": "time to get up", "rise and shine", "good morning", and many other more common colloquial phrases that all essentially meant the same thing all seemed to spark the same response as the original trigger phrase.
At first, he'd figured "teddy" to be the actual trigger phrase, but that had been quickly debunked when he'd activated the golem without its causal moniker. There was also no rune for "teddy", not that it mattered as he was certain there did exist some sort of combination in which the concept of "teddy" could be achieved. What was important, however, was that he'd managed to isolate the part of the script that seemed to be involved with the deceptively complicated teddy golem's logic in regards to its activation. There were many, many more strings that seemed to be doing similar things for other commands, but those would have to wait for the moment. Activation was the easiest and fastest to test, and he was on a bit of a tight schedule. There were only two more days to go before he'd need to get back to his assignments and he was only about a quarter of the way through the code with plenty of question marks next to strings that were supposedly "solved".
For the time being, the full translations weren't nearly as important as determining which symbols were used for specific interactions within the strings. Many golems operated in repeated cycles, their code "looping" for either a determined amount of time or until the command might no longer be able to be completed for one reason or another. Within the collection of strings he'd set aside and copied from his current mess of notes onto a fresh leaf of paper, he'd already noticed a handful of repeated symbols within each of the written lines. In the past, and according to his journal where he kept his notes on each of the previous iterations of Mister Wagner's code, the symbols had been used for a mix of things. At one point it seemed they'd been employed as a sort of "stop", like a period or semicolon, while another they'd functioned more as "and" or "but" conjunctions.
Each of the different loose definitions came from wildly different contexts, and while they shed little light on how the symbols were now being used, they did at least provide examples for what they were not. Foma tapped the bottom of his lip with the back of his pen, absently sucking at the cool wooden rod that housed a simple script he'd written thousands of times already that allowed a small amount of the stored ink inside to fill the pen's fountain as was needed and never more. It was a handy little device that was particularly popular, though Mister Wagner had not been the first workshop to produce it, they'd certainly spent more than enough time working on perfecting it. The one currently halfway into his mouth was an outdated version that occasionally did blot here and there. They'd worked out that kink several iterations back, but he'd been allowed to keep the faulty one to remind him "never forget your mistakes so that you might never make them again" as Miss Holzknecht put it.
From what he could determine, the symbols currently in question were being used as either "if" or "then" exclusive of the other. There was no real objective rhyme or reason when it came to creating scripts. There was both rhyme and reason in regard to the artificer who penned them, but the symbols themselves could really just be shoved together in any which way and still make sense when read by someone who was familiar with them. Whether such hodgepodge creations might function within a nexus or not was a different beast altogether. What mattered was the teddy golem's code was clearly functioning just fine, which meant it was only a matter of figuring out what it was exactly Mister Wagner had been thinking and intending when he'd put the symbols together in the way he had.
Nearly scheduled with how often the thought popped into consciousness, the idea of "why don't you just ask him" floating blithely about his brain for a moment or two before he definitely jotted down his official guess as to which was "if" and which was "then". It was all a precise and draining process of hypothesis, experimentation, observation, and conclusion, which usually led to another hypothesis. There was no way to simply know, so he gathered up a nexus he'd been using exclusively for tests, one he'd stripped right up to the breaking point so he might tear out whatever sheets he was no longer experimenting with, and set to work penning out a few test strings.
The first read simply and in the current style he was attempting to decipher: "if hot then move away". The string itself was a bit longer than he personally would have preferred, too many extra symbols for his tastes, but if the "if" and the "then" were correct, he'd written the string correctly. The glowing symbols slowly faded into the paper-thin sheet of the simple wooden nexus in his hands, and once it was finished, he started on the second: "if hot then move towards". This time he reversed the roles of "if" and "then", as well as mimicked their placements according to where they appeared in the original code. Once that was taken care of, he picked up a well worn, slightly scorched wooden puppet, slotted in the nexus, and mapped out some simple, short-lived lines along its outer shell simply to save time for testing.
He'd already written the basic script for the wooden golem on the original couple of gossamer pages which remained attached to the nexus. The subsequent missing leaflets were all old tests and old experiments, more than enough to remove about half of the nexus itself with still plenty more pages to practice on. Thus, he needed to make no adjustment for activating the little wooden creature with a light tap of his forefinger against its smooth and worn round head. It jittered to life, its motions uncertain and unsteady given the exposure of its lines, but fluidity was hardly needed.
Without any further ado, Foma picked up a nearby candle he'd lit previously more to just slightly warm his workspace than to provide any meaningful light that wasn't already taken care of by the animated lanterns that merrily adorned the workshop's walls, and set it directly in front of the little wooden golem. Though its face was featureless, it still seemed to stare deeply into the flickering flame for a second or two before it slumped forward and, with a quiet splat, slammed its head right into the scalding pool of wax. The wick sputtered out and the golem continued to shuffle blindly forward, but Foma was already scribbling out the question marks about "if" and "then" next to their respective symbols. The first test, at least, suggested his second string had been correct, though he was still going to have to do several more tests with different contexts to make certain.
The struggle of the little wooden golem was put to rest with a light tap of Foma's fingers against its back, inadvertently smudging and subsequently erasing one of the hurried lines he'd mapped out earlier. Extricating the haggard, limp wooden creature from its waxy prison, he set it aside and stood to both stretch his legs as well as go fetch a light to rekindle the candle's flame for further testing.