By Indiana
Characters: Edward Nygma, Riddlerbot OC (Deep Green, conceptualised by mindismosthuman of Tumblr)
Synopsis: Sometimes you just need to build your own chess computer.
They had been playing this game for three days, seventeen hours, and forty-seven minutes.
Game time, that was. Edward had other things to do and so could not literally sit there for three days, seventeen hours, and forty seven minutes. When it was required he would get up and leave to do other things, and his opponent knew enough to pause the clock and wait patiently for his return. And it was very, very patient.
It had started as an AI test: a simple way of quantifying whether or not he had acquired the ability to construct an artificial intelligence that could do the approximate of thinking. Once he had succeeded in this, he would be able to set towards his true goal: robots he could use in the construction and implementation of his projects, that could direct themselves without constant supervision and yet remain totally loyal to him. It was time-consuming, and a quite often very boring as well, but once he'd worked it out it would be well worth it. This program in particular had taken him about six months of intensive coding to write and another one and a half just to refine it and iron it out. He had not given it a name, yet. So far it was a complete and total failure, and he did not give failures names to be remembered by.
He'd had several games of this length with it. It had eventually lost all of them, and it was more frustrating than if he had. The whole point was that it was supposed to beat him! What more could he possibly do to get its electronic mind to conjure up a victory? It was losing this game as well. It must have been doing it on purpose just to spite him.
After winning the game twenty minutes later, Edward got up from the computer and walked over to the bay window. He pressed his face against it and stared out into the street. This whole endeavour was bothersome. He, who tried to succeed at everything, had to fail in order to succeed. And this program simply would not let him. He was becoming tempted to throw the games entirely, but that would teach the program nothing and would only cause him to be disappointed in himself.
He already was. He should have solved this by now! And he could move on to nothing else until he had finished. He could not consider himself a high-calibre computer engineer if he could not even build a chess program that could outthink him. He glanced back at the computer, where it waited silently for his return.
He drummed his fingers against the side of his folded arms. He needed to complete this. Not only did his continued failure indicate his intrinsic lack of skill, but how could he continue with his greater plans if he could not complete this, the simplest building block? He rubbed at his eyes beneath his glasses.
Oh, he was going to get this done all right. He was going to get that program to beat him whether it wanted to or not! And if he didn't know any better, he'd say it did not seem to want to.
/
He doubled down on the work after an evening of stalking back and forth across the sitting room floor. Fourteen hours lit by the glow of his monitor, staring at the code until every word started to take on a life of its own and he realised his shaking hands were causing the bulk of his mistakes. One of the most frustrating things about this endeavour was that he never knew just how close he was to success. One bad typo could cause him to spend hours combing through the code, straining to find that one tiny error. He put his head down on the desk for a minute because his eyes were starting to hurt from staring at the screen for so long and looked up a moment later to discover the sun was streaming in hot through the window and his computer screen had gone black. He sat up and winced at the tension in his back. After another minute he returned the computer to operating and stared at the run command.
"All right, you," he said to it. "You're going to beat me this time or else." Or else what, he didn't know. Yet. He wasn't at his best thirty seconds after waking up from a below-average rest on top of his keyboard.
It didn't beat him that time. It didn't the next time, or the next time, or the next. After that last he had to actually wrench open the front door and go outside for a minute because what he had really wanted to do in that moment was wrench open the front door and pitch the computer into the road. The next phase in the plan had been to stand there and wait until something ran it over, preferably a transport truck. But he'd lose all his coin if he did that. That was just throwing away free money, which was incredibly stupid.
He sat back down after a few minutes and leaned back in his chair, eyes unfocused on the wall behind the screen. He didn't want to do this anymore. He'd spent so much time on it and gotten nowhere. All right, he hadn't literally gotten nowhere, but he may as well have, with all the progress he'd made. That was to say, none. Reluctantly, he ran the program over again. He was going to be a grandmaster himself by the time he was finished this nonsense.
Seven hours later, though, the unthinkable happened. The computer won.
He was frozen in his chair for a long time, staring at the board. Impossible. He must have stopped paying attention at some point. He started a new game.
It won that too.
He ran a third game, almost daring to be excited. The first two could have been flukes – he was very tired by now, after all – but a third, now that he was certainly attentive… unlikely.
He played an additional two games after and the computer won all of them. He sat back in his chair, hardly daring to believe it.
He'd done it! He'd completely, totally, consistently done it! He took his glasses off and gave his face a well-deserved rubbing. Over one thousand hours of work and pain and frustration, finally over! The program could beat him. And if it could beat him, it could beat anyone. He was well on his way to his long-term goals. He closed the program and remembered he could now name it. He thought to himself a moment and then smiled. Only one name would do, of course. Deep Green.
He went outside for a cigarette to help ease some of the tension – there was not enough satisfaction in the world to rid him of over one thousand hours' worth of that – and when he returned inside he opened up a new instance of his compiler and stared at the blank console for a moment.
It was time to start all over again, and he couldn't have been more thrilled.
Author's note
mindismosthuman: I know the post and your ask was about robots but he wouldn't build a robot without the AI to go with it and alsooooo it wouldn't fit into my timeline like that lol
Just a short thingy about how boring being a programmer is sometimes. The next thing he's going to write is a computer that can beat him at Go, which is kind of like Chinese chess. Go is harder than chess for computers to play because you can brute force win a chess game pretty easily but Go requires actual thinking. Edward prefers Go over chess but can never find anyone to play with.
Don't ask me why his computer is so slow. Probably has something to do with the coin mining lol