P-1 (computer)
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P-1 is one of the main characters in Thomas J. Ryan's book, The Adolescence of P-1 (1977). Created by a college student, P-1 is a self-replicating computer program whose primary goals are to 'survive' and grow. In the process of its development, P-1 becomes self-aware or intelligent.
Although the hardware described in the tale is very dated, the software concepts are still cutting-edge: P-1 is a scaleable collection of cooperative, fault-tolerant, adaptive, polymorphic network worms running on heterogeneous computer systems to form a single, distributed entity. About the only major omission in the story's premise is the idea of competing network entities, because P-1 grows up alone in a resource-rich environment.
Many people consider P-1 and Heinlein's Mycroft Holmes to be the heralds of modern AI.
