Molting the Mortal Coil - Chapter 871

Chapter 871: Biological

Most of the parts of the biological computer came together with a bit of brainstorming. For data storage, they created a species of small ant-like bug that reserved a large portion of its mind for storage that it couldn’t really access. With so much of its memory ‘reserved’ it was very simple and had to be fed by other bugs. Sage couldn’t help himself from giving them a stupid name: Bitebug.

The next part of the system interacted with the Bitebugs and they decided on a spider that included the Hypnotic Eyes as well as an Ancestral Memory implanted Spirit Power technique of Telepathy. It could create a web without too much stickiness for the Bitebugs to live upon. With the web it could keep track of the Bitebug’s positions. Using the Hypnotic Eyes and Telepathy it can call over the Bitebug’s to access their ‘data’, reading their minds and then transferring the data to a pair of Bitebugs that acted as registers. Without putting much thought into it, he used another silly name: Spider Driver.

For the control unit there were upgraded Spider Drivers. They also had the Golden Cicada’s Brood Master power along with the innate Law of Amalgamation. It used the Brood Master’s ability to control the Spider Drivers and the Law of Amalgamation to oversee the Bitebugs. Not all of the Bitebugs were used strictly for data storage. Along with being registers there were some that were assigned to hold instructions of what data to use and what to do with it. Sage ran out of fun names and just called this bug the Master Unit.

With these three insects most of the basics were covered, but a few key parts were missing. There was no proper method of interface, or how to feed instructions into the system, but they used their own Hypnotic Eyes as a workaround to start with.

There was also no output, but they quickly solved that problem. Sage had already invented a Movie Projector to create a constant visual projection. Yet, the projector only showed what was on a Memory Sphere. To keep things simple they used Ancestral Memories to program a bug with the knowledge to operate a Memory Altar and constantly implant a scene in its mind into a Memory Sphere. It had to be large and powerful enough to constantly generate enough Qi to power the Memory Altar and the Movie Projector. Since it also needed to be too dumb to know how to do anything else, they used a huge worm and gave it a simple moniker, Mind Worm. To create output, a Spider Driver was tasked with reading from Bitebugs and using that data to modify the scene in the brain of the Mind Worm.

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With a temporary input method the only missing component was the Arithmetic Logic Unit. Unfortunately, this was also the core of the system and also the most difficult to solve. There were attempts to create bugs that could do math, but he realized that without binary and binary math, computing large numbers became very complicated. Rather than focusing on trying to create smarter and smarter creatures to take this position, they contemplated switching to a binary style system, but before taking that option they tried an alternative. The Arithmetic Logic Unit performed comparisons and mathematical operations. Rather than rely upon an organic solution, they used a more reliable option: Formation Arrays. Not only could they be used to do math and comparisons, it also opened up the option for other sorts of operations. Could they compare images or concepts in some way? That was a whole can of worms which was contrary to the purpose of a computer doing calculations rapidly so they stuck with numbers to start out with.

There was another difficulty as they had to create a standardized format for the numbers in order to be computed properly in the formations. In the interest of not driving himself insane, he settled upon using a base ten system. Since they weren’t limited to measuring an electrical charge they could use base ten instead of base two. It took some effort to translate numbers into a format for the formations to understand but eventually they figured out they couldn’t use simple Bitebugs for the registers and accumulator, the input and output of the Arithmetic Logic Unit. Special Bitebugs had to be made that had better control of their Qi. Then they could use Qi to represent numbers and input them into the Formation Arrays.

After decades of breeding and experimentation along with solving dozens of other problems along the way they finally built a functioning computer. There were still many problems, but they had initial success. The system was still far too slow, considering it required living beings to move around and transfer information between each other rather than electrical signals moving at speeds approaching the speed of light. There was also the issue of no compiler, or a method of converting common input into a format the system liked better. This step was more important in a normal computer as everything had to be in machine code, but they didn’t exactly follow that standard. This was of course one of their difficulties. There was a large amount of debate about the merits of creating a more complex type of ‘operating code’. Eventually, they gave up on it and standardized a more simplistic format for their data. It cut down on the more whimsical ideas, but it was also something that he knew worked. The more standardized the format of the data, the easier it was to standardize operations upon it, and also to increase its speed.

Developing an operating system while knowing next to nothing about operating systems was certainly an interesting challenge and they spent many years on this task. It was especially difficult as the system had started to use many ‘cores’ in order to increase its speed. The Spider Drivers and Master Units could only move and transfer instructions at a limited speed, but nothing stopped them from just having more of them working in concert. Essentially, the bio-computer had hundreds of cores, complete with Master Unit, Spider Drivers, formations, and a bunch of Bitebugs, but each of these cores had a far slower processor speed. They had to build a system that relied heavily upon multi-threading which was a difficult task to have many cores running concurrently without performing simultaneous operations upon the same data. If you wanted to add to and then multiply a certain number, there would be a big problem if the multiplication happened before the addition. It was even worse if they were simultaneous. Would the data end up multiplied or added to? The data might be added to, then the multiplication would finish and overwrite the result of the addition. The system would think both operations had been performed when only one of them had been.

These were only the beginning of their problems, but luckily time was on their side. Lots and lots of time. Over and over again the systems were redesigned and altered. They had thousands of years to iterate upon the bio-computer, creating many forms of living hardware and programming software that could transform the Inner World.