The 25 science fiction stories I most liked

Isaac Asimov

In the United States fiction is classified depending on the length of the work, with four subsequent stages:

1. Novel, any work that has more than 40,000 words.
2. Novella, a work between 17,500 and 40,000 words.
3. Novelette, between 7,500 and 17,500 words.
4. Short Story, less than 7,500 words.

Naturally, the limits are not strict, and in practice they depend on who classifies each book. In Spanish, however, we have fewer categories:

1. Novel.
2. Short novel, which applies to works of intermediate length.
3. Story, with few characters and a simple plot.

Split brain

Roger Sperry

During the 50s of the twentieth century, the American neurobiologist Roger Sperry performed various investigations on animals, and human epilepsy patients who suffered repeated attacks, intense and persistent. As a solution to these attacks, he used the somewhat drastic (but possibly necessary) technique of cutting the corpus callosum, a bundle of nerve connections that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. The treatment was successful and provided Sperry with a number of subjects with whom he could experience what happens when the two cerebral hemispheres are disconnected from each other.

In his experiments, Sperry proved that the two cerebral hemispheres can act independently. He also discovered that their function is different: the left hemisphere is usually the seat of aggressiveness, logical processes, and the interpretation of written and spoken word. The right hemisphere is responsible for short-term memory, global thinking, artistic activities (as our response to music) and the analysis of spatial relationships. These investigations shed light on diseases and behaviors such as autism, depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. In 1981, Sperry received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, shared with David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel for a different research.

Fred Saberhagen versus the Turing Test

Alan Turing

In 1950, the English mathematician and chemist Alan Turing tried to define the conditions so that it would be possible to affirm that a machine is capable of thinking like us. For Turing, this will be achieved when the machine is capable of deceiving human beings, making them think that it is one of them. This test is called the imitation game. I have talked about this in a previous post in this blog.

In 1956, Arthur Samuel of IBM built a program to play the game called draughts or checkers. The program kept information about the moves in the games it had played, which was used to modify its future moves (in other words, it learned). In a few years, after playing many games, the program was able to defeat its creator and played reasonably well in official championships.

That same year, during a summer course held in Dartmouth College, John McCarthy and other computer pioneers coined the term artificial intelligence. Getting their hopes too high, they predicted spectacular advances for the next ten years, which did not take place in the time envisaged, but much later. I have also written about this in another post.

In 1963, science fiction writer Fred Saberhagen published the first story of his famous series about the berserkers, autonomous and intelligent space fortresses created by an ancient extraterrestrial civilization to exterminate intelligent life wherever it appears in the galaxy. This story, titled Without a thought, is an answer to the Turing Test and a brake to the unbridled hopes of the inventors of the term artificial intelligence. This is the plot of the story: