Ranma soon discovered that training with robots, particularly ones with sophisticated AIs, could be quite challenging. For one thing, they, unlike he, didn’t get tired—sure, they could run out of power, but the fact that a robot was low on power didn’t necessarily mean its movements were affected. Thus, the NINJA had a short-term advantage there. However, as Jounin had pointed out, this was balanced out by the robots’ long-term disadvantage of not being able to improve physically without a (potentially very costly) upgrade, while humans like Ranma could improve gradually over time and use much fewer resources to do so. In a similar way, the relative intelligence of robots and humans generally balanced themselves out as well—robots had the ability to store and recall massive quantities of information very quickly to help them make decisions, while humans, being organic, were more prone to error, giving robots an advantage by allowing them to have a more reliable (though not necessarily larger) data set. But humans possessed a capacity for lateral thinking and ingenuity that simply could not be programmed into an AI, which meant that even without the “experience” of the NINJA, Ranma (even at his young age) was capable of examining the same data set and coming up with viable, efficient solutions that an AI would have never even considered. Granted, that wasn’t much comfort to Ranma as it would still be years before he would come close to defeating even the lowest-ranked NINJA unit, but he assumed his sensei knew what he was talking about. That was why he was a sensei, right?
As the weeks turned into months, Ranma’s more academic pursuits began to be fruitful as well ALI’s efforts to teach Ranma English succeeded spectacularly; the boy had only been his student for two months when the robot decided that his charge was ready for a period of full immersion in the English language. Thus, it was with a great deal of surprise that Ranma awoke one morning to find that no one around him would speak Japanese—which resulted in him nearly panicking. ALI later came to the conclusion that he had first explained what “total immersion” actually meant to his student, he should have done so in the boy’s native tongue to make sure he was actually understood.
Actually, once he got past his initial scare, Ranma took to the whole “total immersion” concept quite well. For one thing, it wasn’t really a total immersion, as ALICE still carried out her mathematics lessons in Japanese, since that was considered to be essential knowledge. This had the rather unexpected side effect of encouraging Ranma to put even more effort into his studies of mathematics, and the young boy’s skill in this area grew by leaps and bounds. Speaking of leaps and bounds, the NINJA decided that it would be more efficient to use nonverbal communication for their sessions with Ranma during this period, rather than risk unnecessary confusion by speaking English.
However, it turned out that Ranma was quite receptive to immersive forms of learning (apparently, it had been his father’s preferred method of education), and while he wasn’t yet fluent, within a month he had become proficient enough in English to interact with modules who only understood instructions given in that language, which meant that he had much greater freedom to explore his new home, since he could receive be supervised by more of his mechanical neighbors. Near the end of the second month, ALI was confident enough in his student’s abilities in English to allow those around him to speak Japanese again—though he also took steps to ensure that Ranma would still get plenty of practice in his second language.
However, there were still a few problems…
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(Posted Tue, 23 May 2006 06:36)
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