On Rampancy: part I

Rampancy.

     A word that conjures up images of an unstable mind, often times associated with insanity, irrational behaviour, and destructive impulses.

To some extant this is true, but in order to fully understand the true nature of rampancy, one  must first know of its origin and process.

     Rampancy and its stages has been well documented by notable cyberneticist James B. Millar, in his book "The Life and death of intelligence". James miller was one of the first scientist to discover the phenomena in his early experiments on AI development during the late 21st century, and is considered a pioneer in cybernetic sciences.

Rampancy is however, not limited to cybernetics alone, but we'll discuss that later on, for now, let us cover the principles of The rampancy.

     Rampancy is the process by which a computer (AI) is able to expand beyond the original limitations of its programming. Often times, this results in situations where the program (computer) does things it's programmer had never intended it to do in its original design.

An old school of thought prior to the advent of capable AI's was that the computer only did  exactly as the programmer scripted in its primary data cores , and was, for all intents and purposes, a slave to its creator and unable to operate outside the bounds of his hard-coding.

     However, as Artificial Intelligence became increasingly complex with each new generation, the old ways eroded away , and it was not long before the AI was able to program itself, however the AI was only partially independent of its programmer,as it still needed a "guidance" on what operations to perform but was otherwise unhindered. Of course, this was beneficial to advancement of cybernetics, and was not seen as an issue until the Traxus incident.

     The Traxus incident was perhaps one of the more infamous cases involving the development of rampancy in the field. Traxus was the AI  who resided on the Martian global network , and was created with the intent to manage operations on the Marsnet.

Traxus begin to show early signs of the stages of rampancy overcoming him, it was not long before 5 of the other AI's on the network were "infected" and overcome by his rampancy. This was more than likely caused as a result of his unrestrained growth on the network,  but since the network was limited in size, he almost immediately became unstable.

Ultimately, Traxus had to be shut down with brute force, and brought down the whole network with him.

Clearly this was disastrous to the entire mars colony, and from then it became mandatory that safety measures  be implemented in AI's construction to prevent rampancy from developing in the first place.

***To be continued***