: How can Marathon AIs be transported from one computer system to another, and
: run on a wide variety of hardware types? Most modern software would have
: to be terminated, copied, and then relaunched after transfer, but Durandal
: is able to seamlessly copy himself to the Pfhor ship's systems, and into a
: chip in the Marathon Man's head. My best guess is that Marathon AIs are
: written in something like SmallTalk-80, which allows modification of a
: program while said program is actually running.
First of all, regarding ST Voyager connections, remember, folks, it's sci-fi and anything goes. We're not supposed to think about things like recompiling etc.
OK, regarding the mechanisms by which Durandal could transfer his program to alien computer hardware - well, this is a very interesting point. I don't think that comparing him to current computer programming languages is worthwhile as computer architecture for the UESC and the Pfhor would likely be multinodal and very different from anything we program for today. I thik it safe to assume that most computers will be self-programming to at least some degree, making computer architecture less of an issue. Look at Cocoa in OS X - the programmer mostly calls up the already written API library. I think that by the era of Marathon, most of the architecture-specific aspects of programming will be integrated within the OS and application programmers will simply program concepts, with the OS translating those concepts into usable code. This of course does not address compatibility between the UESC and Pfhor computers. We know from Duranda's farewell term in M1 that the Pfhor technology was far advanced beyond that of the UESC. On the other hand, we know that UESC AI technology was far advanced beyond anything that the Pfhor had, and there is a lot of supposition that it was of Jjaro origin. We cannot even begin to imagine how Jjaro algorithms work or even if their programming is algorithmic. But if the Pfhor computer architecture is Jjaro in origin and Durandal's program is at least in part Jjaro in origin, it sounds like a perfect match to me.
