This is page 2/4 of the article.
Start reading from here.

Summary

Project Alicization is a secret military project for creation of the "Bottom-up AI", the world-first Highly Adaptive Bottom-up Artificial Intelligence, supervised and developed by Rath.

Development History

Conception of Underworld (Continued)

To conserve the workload of creating the world, a free game creation kit by Kayaba Akihiko "The Seed" was used to design the VR world, which was then automatically converted to the STL-compatible mnemonic visuals. The Seed server would run just for the world interactions in parallel with the STL layer. The bundled Cardinal System was used as-is, and the system's Fluctlight Acceleration (FLA) rate was set to 1,000×. The VR world was dubbed "Underworld".

Development of Underworld

In order to raise the first sixteen AIs in an in-game village, the world needed a kickstart. Common NPCs were used for the other villagers, and four Rath employees volunteered to log in and become village farmers for the sixteen in-game years to raise the AI children as their own, which amounted to a week in real life with the FLA in effect. Afterwards, a plague was simulated allowing to naturally log out the volunteers, whose memories about the cradle world were suppressed. After their Underworld "deaths", the FLA was ticked up to 5,000×, and the AI people continued to populate the world.

After 300 Underworld years (three weeks), no NPCs remained, and the AI nation counted 80 thousand people, expanding their borders from the starting village to the most of the Underworld, having founded a government and later religion.

Further in, Underworld developed into a feudal system with royalty and the Axiom church being at the top. The feudalism was not according to the development plan, and may well have sprung forth from one of the "progenitors'" notions bestowed to their "children" even from something as trifling as hints or fairy tales.

Underworld Development Issues

As developers of military-grade AI, Rath faced up to an awkward problem wherein Underworld has never experienced a single killing, not to mention a war, since the AIs saw no reason in breaking the laws or rules and had been historically obedient.

Early Fix Attempts

During the course of the Overload experiment, an isolated village was picked and its food sources were decimated enough for the villagers to either starve to death in winter or choose to save the food for the few who would survive. The villagers distributed the food evenly and all starved to death. The experiment proved that the laws meant more to the AIs than their survival.

To find out if the extreme obedience of the AIs was an innate glitch, eight employees volunteered to have their memories blocked for the duration of their stay and to live as children in Underworld for ten years in various environments. None of them broke the Taboo Index during their virtual lives; moreover, their memories were not completely blocked, so they felt a discrepancy subliminally and grew up as even more reserved people than the AIs.

Later Fix

The researchers decided they needed a new test subject, one that is used to living in a VR world and would not feel any discrepancy with the real world. Kirigaya Kazuto, a Sword Art Online survivor, was a good candidate for that reason, as well as due to his extraordinary fighting skill and flexibility. Indeed, Kirito was much more curious and active than the in-house volunteers, and nearly broke the Taboo Index many times. Although he never actually broke the laws, his influence on his close people, Eugeo and Alice Zuberg, made them bolder, and Alice broke a taboo when she tried to save a dying Fluctlight and had to touch the Dark Territory for it. However, before the real-world research team could react to the infraction, days had passed in Underworld, and Alice had been taken to the Central Cathedral of the Axiom Church and forcibly Synthesized.

Continued on page 3.

References

• Project Alicization - Fan Wiki