一、原文：
At MediaTronics I had run a program division, riding herd over a group of talented young computer programmers. At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job. So I managed the team, and it was a full-time job; like most Silicon Valley programmers, my team seemed to live in a perpetual crisis of crashed Porsches, infidelities, bad love affairs, parental hassles, and drug reactions, all superimposed on a forced-march work schedule with all-night marathons fueled by cases of Diet Coke and Sun chips.
分析：
1。此译本中一律把计算机程序设计人员称为“程序编制员”，这种说法是不确切的。因为在计算机行业里，程序设计人员的通常称呼都是“程序员”、“程序设计员”或“程序师”，却从来没有什么“程序编制员”的说法。程序设计就是设计或者编写程序（而非“编制”程序），通俗地说就是写代码，它与把一堆现有材料做成产品（成品）的工作方式是不同的，它是一种纯粹的创造性的工作，是在系统需求任务书（计划或方案）的基础上，在计算机上用代码把这个系统的所有功能用程序实现出来的一种创造性的活动。显然，这种方式与“编制”的一般概念是不同的，而“程序编制员”的叫法只会让人想起那些编制报表的人员；
2。“it was a full-time job”被译成“那是一份全职工作”似乎有误，在这里似应改为“那是一个全天候的工作”。
二、原文：
But the work was exciting, in a cutting-edge field. We wrote what are called distributed parallel processing or agent-based programs. （P4页）
三、原文：
These programs model biological processes by creating virtual agents inside the computer and then letting the agents interact to solve real-world problems.
四、原文：
Actually, it was my division’s source code—software for distributed processing. That was the code that had been stolen. We knew it was the same code, because the Easter eggs hadn’t been touched.
六、原文：
Certainly my team had written a number of programs to control swarms of agents. Those programs were modeled on behavior of bees. The programs had many useful characteristics. Because swarms were composed of many agents, the swarm could respond to the environment in a robust way. Faced with new and unexpected conditions, the swarm programs didn’t crash; they just sort of flowed around the obstacles, and kept going.
七、原文：
“We use them for structure,” she said. “The program makes the swarm structure.”
Of course. It was obvious that a single molecular camera was inadequate to register any sort of image. Therefore, the image must be a composite of millions of cameras, operating simultaneously. But the cameras would also have to be arranged in space in some orderly structure, probably a sphere. That was where the programming came in. But that in turn meant that Xymos must be generating the equivalent of—
八、原文：
“She’s taken a real interest in the technology, I can tell you. Also, they’re doing a lot of programming up there, too,” he said. “You know. Iterative cycles as they refine the manufacturing.”
九、原文：
In fact, assembling atoms to make a new molecule was closely analogous to compiling a computer program from individual lines of code. And computer code never compiled, the first time out. The programmers always had to go back and fix the lines. And even after it was compiled, a computer program never ever worked right the first time. Or the second time. Or the hundredth time. It had to be debugged, and debugged again, and again. And again.
十、原文：
I always believed it would be the same with these manufactured molecules—they’d have to be debugged again and again before they worked right. And if Xymos wanted “flocks” of molecules working together, they’d also have to debug the way the molecules communicated with each other, however limited that communication was. Because once the molecules communicated, you had a primitive network. To organize it, you’d probably program a distributed net. Of the kind I had been developing at MediaTronics.
十一、原文：
Eventually, programmers say the agents have beliefs about their environment, and that they are acting on those beliefs. That’s not literally true, of course, but it might as well be true. It looks that way.
十二、原文：
In evolutionary programs, those agents get killed off. They have no children. In other multi-agent programs, they just get bypassed, pushed to the periphery while the main thrust of agents moves on. Some programs have a “grim reaper” module that sifts them out from time to time, and pulls them off the board.
But the point is, they’re stuck in their own past. Sometimes they pull themselves together, and get back on track. Sometimes they don’t.
Thoughts like these made me very uneasy. I shifted in my chair, glanced at the clock. With a sense of relief, I saw it was time to go pick up the kids.
十四、原文：
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I’m perfectly positioned in a hot field, multi-agent distributed processing, and—”
“Hot?” she said, squinting at me. “Distributed processing’s not hot, Jack. It’s fucking radioactive. Everybody in the Valley figures that the breakthroughs in artificial life are going to come from distributed processing.”
“They are,” I said, nodding.
十五、原文：
In the last few years, artificial life had replaced artificial intelligence as a long-term computing goal. The idea was to write programs that had the attributes of living creatures—the ability to adapt, cooperate, learn, adjust to change. Many of those qualities were especially important in robotics, and they were starting to be realized with distributed processing.