Skelebot

In order to make up for the sheer volume of invaders, Earth's humans had to resort to a number of different means to bolster their forces. In the early days of the Great Cataclysm, when humans still retained some manufacturing capacity, remote operated drones and ground robots were attempted.   They lasted as long as the infrastructure to support them did, which wasn't long at all.   With the revival of man in The Coalition States came also the revival of a technological infrastructure to support large scale manufacturing again. But it was not until the defeat of the coalition forces by the necromancers of the Federation of Magic, and in particular the use of artifacts like One One and The Bones that rendered the human soldiers of the coalition armies ineffectual at best, did the Coalition consider resurrecting the use of robotic combat units.   Gone were the days when combat robots needed to be remotely operated. The Baku Accords no longer applied and the ability to discriminate between military and non-military targets was unnecesary when the genocide of all non-humans was the goal.   So skelebots were created. Designed using the Coalition's Death's Head motif, Skelebots used a two-layer artificial intelligence control system. The first layer is called the governor. It comprises the set of executive instructions used to make decisions. As complex as they are, these instructions are just nested logic, they are merely coded instructions. This means that skelebots are non-intelligent and act only as they are programmed. One could liken the governer layer to firmware. The second layer is called the Body Control System (BCS). This is an actual artificial intelligence capable of learning that assesses external and internal stimuli and responds according to how it has learned. It receives direction from the Governor and carries it out to the best of its ability. Running, walking, looking this way or that, aiming, shooting, punching, compensating for battle damage and all other possible physical responses are carried out by the BCS. No two skelebots react the same way. Some will take longer strides than others, some take longer to aim, some use handheld weapons better than others, some are more perceptive than others, and the list of idiosynchracies goes on. When they come off the assembly line they all have the same common baseline BCS AI behavior, but as skelebots get more real world experience, their BCS adapts and learns and becomes more unique.


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