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of numbers is astonished at the "magic" of arithmetic that has been independently discovered.
Three robot stories are contained in Asimov's Nightfall and Other Stories published in 1969.
"Insert Knob A in Hole B," Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1957, is a minor short-short about two spacemen on a space station who cannot get equipment to work properly because it is all shipped unassembled with inadequate instructions. Finally, they are shipped a robot programmed to put everything together. But it arrives unassembled.
"The Machine That Won the War," Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1961, is another Multivac story. Multivac has been given credit for winning the war with aliens from the star Deneb. But in the last few months of the war, the man who was feeding Multivac the data began to fudge it because the data was unreliable, the man who was reading the results began to fudge them because he knew Multivac was unreliable, and the man who had to make the decisions relied on flipping a coin.
"Segregationist," Abbottempo, Book 4, 1967, describes a world in which humans are getting metal replacement parts that make them increasingly like robots, and robots are getting fibroid replacement parts that make them increasingly like humans. The surgeon is old-fashioned and prefers to be all one thing robot.
The Best of Isaac Asimov, published in 1973, contains, in addition to a reprint of "The Last Question," a robot story involving Elijah ("Lije") Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, the principal characters in Asimov's two robot detective novels, The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. "Mirror Image," Analog, May 1972, presents a problem in which two robots confirm identically opposite stories of their masters, each of whom claims to have discovered an important mathematical technique and to have confided it to the other. Olivaw brings the problem to Baley. Baley questions the robots and comes up, finally, with an asymmetrical response that he interprets as proving the older mathematician's robot is lying. At the end, Baley reveals that the response could have meant just the opposite, but he already had decided that the older mathematician would never have confided in a younger man.
Five additional stories are included in The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories, an Asimov collection published in 1976.
"Feminine Intuition," Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1969, introduced a feminine robot for the first time (other than the throwaway MA series in "First Law"). JN-5 ("Jane") is developed to be intuitive and to produce useful guesses about which suns are likely to have habitable

 
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