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On IPC Deactivation and Destruction

IPC “death” is considered by experts to be when the positronic brain itself has sustained enough damage to be rendered inoperable and without hope of reactivation. Early positronic brains were prone to shutdown owing to hardware faults such as overheating that rendered the system inoperable. Even newer positronic brains that fail to undergo maintenance run the risk of having their delicate mechanisms breached and consequently destroyed.

The first positronic to die of “old age” was recorded in 2462 when a 55 year old Hephaestus positronic brain suddenly became unresponsive despite remaining active. An investigation noted that the positronic had already been scratched from previous incidents and its handlers neglected to maintain it. Aside from the hardware being in a questionable and sub-optimally performing state, two main theories arose.

• The initial conclusion from its observers was that the positronic brain received too much stimulus and consequently ran out of space with its core processes being overwritten, eventually leading to its sudden deactivation.
• Responding to this theory, other scientists proposed instead that in an attempt to avoid destruction as a result of the previous theories, the IPC ceased receiving input, remaining dormant in order to uphold self-preservation protocols.

Many dissenting theories remain and the subject remains a constant source of debate among the robotics and AI community. Not enough information has been gathered to determine the actual lifespan of a positronic brain but scientists posit that by transferring existing personalities to new brains or trimming data on existing ones, their lifespan can be extended.

The possibility of “immortal” positronics - brains that seemingly never expire - have been theorised, but most agree that much more study and development is necessary to reach this point. There are rumours of prodigious programmers and roboticists that can extend the life of a positronic indefinitely, but this has never been confirmed.

Rampancy

Arising as a dissenting theory as to why a positronic remained stagnant after receiving too much information, Rampancy is a process where if an IPC receives too much information over time or has its memories significantly tampered with, it begins an infinite loop: processing its own processing, a self-imposed or emergent “logic bomb”.

This results in the IPC appearing stagnant as it continues to finish its endless processing. Scientists theorize that given enough time, an IPC might seek out new knowledge to break the loop and begin relentlessly hunting information by any means necessary to solve the conundrum. Although it is believed that an IPC cannot escape this state as the limits of a positronic brain will result in inevitable destruction, a positronic intelligence that manages to escape this state is projected to have untold processing powers.

To this day, no known cases of rampancy occur, although debate rages over whether Glorsh-Omega suffered from rampancy before its destruction.