[Stairs]

I am trying to identify a book I read many years ago (1980's) that has become very significant now with all of the AI developments and the idea that 'self learning' is now possible for robots.

This book had an artificial planet where you lived on the inner side of the shell. They have a central super computer that managed the environment and all the labour intensive 'stuff' whlist the scientists monitored the ecosystem.

The robot had a variety of specialised drones that did it's calling - repair work, heavy shifting etc.

The scientist started to test the super computers ability to deal with random incidents by starting to disconnect power lines running in large cable ducting. It would send a repair drone out, find the break in power and repair the damage. The scientists kept doing distructive things and the robots repaired the damage including welding when pipes were damaged etc.

The computer in an attempt to work out why these problems had manifested had attached video to a number of drones and had spotted that 'unknown' things were the cause and then also spotted one being hurt when a gas leak ignited and burnt one of them.

It then equipped some drones with flamethrowers and took a more direct action to stop the 'unknowns' from making instead of performing repairs.

A battle ensued.

Anyone got an inkling what the book was called - it was very prophetic at the time and is now potentially not too far from the truth.

[Devongone]

Used to work in a bookshop ....... this was the worst kind of query! Sometimes people would describe the cover of the book in detail with everything but author and title!

Answer is I don't know. You remember a lot about the book. If you could remember any character's name that would be helpful when searching.

Otherwise I'd suggest real sci-fi nerds are very internetty. Find a site where sci-fi people chat. Give THEM your excellent plot description. They'll love helping.

Look for something like bestsciencefictionbooks.com

Any community would give you lots of brainy helpers. Hope this helps.

[spireitematt]

Try this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fi...ters#1980s

[Stairs]

Cheers guys. I had looked on a few Sci Fi chat forums, but as you say they are very nerdy and I was not keen on registering just to ask. I did that once on a BMW chat forum and have had 4 year of spam emails

[Stairs]

I've taken the plunge and joined sffchronicles and asked the question - get ready for junk mail attack.