Terminator Glossary

Major AI textbooks define artificial intelligence as "the study and design of intelligent agents," where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success.

AI can be seen as a realization of an abstract intelligent agent (AIA) which exhibits the functional essence of intelligence. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines."

AI is explored in depth in the following movies: "A.I." by Stephen Spielberg, and "I, Robot" based on the book by Isaac Asimov.

Specific to Terminator Franchise: Laser barcodes are identification numbers burned onto Skynet Work Camp prisoners by laser scan, presumably to keep track of them. According to the Terminator 2 shooting script, these barcodes are ten-digit numbers with a pattern of lines below it, like a traditional product barcode.

Pictured at the left is Derek Reese's barcode from TSCC.

T-600s were made of a titanium alloy endoskeleton, but were vulnerable to heat. Coltan alloys have a much higher melting point, making it a superior alloy for endoskeletons

Working on the top secret project at Cyberdyne Systems, Dyson dedicated his life to the development and production of the Central Processing Unit (CPU), sometimes to the detriment of his family life. Surrounded by like minded scientist, and working in Cyberdyne's expansive labs, Dyson had the run of the best design and testing facilities available. Creating a strong "community" bond and relaxed working environment, Dyson was soon able to increase productivity and earn the respect of his fellow researchers.

After many long years of work, Dyson eventually hit upon a prototype model that was not only worked and was bug free, but was superconductive at room temperature, making it extremely powerful. It marked the beginning of the end.

The CPU was modeled and designed primarily on computers in advanced 3-Dimensional programming packages, where simulated testing could be done in real time, or at increased rates.

The lattice of cubes in the construction of the prototype CPU suggests a "hypercube" (a cube of more than three dimensions). In computer design, hypercubes are used as a physical connection scheme that minimizes the effective communication distance (and therefore the time delay) between processors, when the logical connection scheme needed by the software that will be run on those processors cannot be known in advance. This then supports the Neural Nets ability to learn, adapt, and built new logical connection schemes.

In the 2003 film Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, is a fictional subterranean fallout shelter in the Sierra Nevada mountains, apparently built by the U.S. Government during the height of the Cold War as a last resort for government and military VIPs. Like the real Cheyenne Mountain, it is deep underground and outfitted with an extensive computer bay (although the computers are around 30 years old and have limited functionality), emergency television broadcast center, which is fitted with a backdrop and podium for the President of the United States, 1960s-style furnishings, and ample survival supplies, including food. There is also a radio system in place, used by John Connor to communicate with Montana Civil Defense in the last moments of the film.

Crystal Peak is where Kate's father, General Robert Brewster, sends John and Kate at the end of Terminator 3, to safely endure the onset of Judgment Day. General Brewster tells John and Kate, "...it's your only chance." John takes this to mean it was where they could find Skynet's system core. Connor is expecting to find a modern computer-control center and facilities that can be used to shut down Skynet, but is confused as to why the General would send them to an outdated shelter for VIPs. Kate, in an epiphany, realizes it was her father's goal to ensure they would live. John finally realizes that Skynet, being distributed computing, never had a control center or system core that could be shut down.

After a T-800 series Terminator, Cyberdyne Systems Model 101— a cyborg from the future, designed to kill humans — is crushed in one of the company's hydraulic presses, the company secretly begins manufacturing technological devices based on reverse engineering the Terminator's remains. Cyberdyne reverse engineers the recovered CPU from the destroyed cyborg and creates a powerful new microprocessor for weapons systems, becoming a major contractor for the US military.

The Borg (pictured) are the best examples of a a Cyborg. They are a fictional pseudo-race of cyborgs depicted in Star Trek. The Borg appear in many elements of the Trek franchise, playing major roles in The Next Generation and Voyager TV series, notably as an invasion threat to the Federation, and the means of return of the stranded Federation starship Voyager. The Borg have become a symbol in popular culture for any juggernaut against whom "resistance is futile."

Skynet's most popular endoskeleton cyborg was its Series 800 terminator, which used a metallic endoskeleton covered with living tissue. For years Skynet tried to imitate the human body in structure, functionality and looks on its robots so that it could build a perfect Infiltrator. The 800 Series was a breakthrough in developing terminators that were similar to humans.

An equivalent paradox is known (in philosophy) as autoinfanticide — that is, going back in time and killing oneself as a baby — though when the word was first coined in a paper by Paul Horwich it was in the version autofanticide.

The grandfather paradox has been used to argue that backwards time travel must be impossible. However, a number of possible ways of avoiding the paradox have been proposed, such as the idea that the timeline is fixed and unchangeable, or the idea that the time traveler will end up in a parallel timeline, while the timeline in which the traveler was born continues to exist.

The T-800 was the first truly successful Infiltrator unit, consisting of living tissue over a metal endoskeleton despite that the T-720 had living tissue too [citation needed]. Earlier attempts at Infiltrator units include the T-600, which used rubber skin over a metal endoskeleton.

Later Infiltrator units were based on mimetic poly-alloy technology:

T-1000: The mimetic poly-alloy construction of the T-1000 allowed it to replicate any object or person of similar volume that it molecularly sampled by physical contact.

T-X: The T-X Series used a liquid metal outer sheath of mimetic poly-alloy to cover a metal endoskeleton.

Additional research was put forward into increasingly organic terminators able to more efficiently evade detection and infiltrate human organizations.

TS-300: The TS-300 is a stealth Infiltrator that uses ceramic endoskeletons and personality transfer software to create undetectable one-off copies of real human beings.

I-950: Unlike previous terminators, the I-950 was born rather than created with technological enhancements added over time; the I-950 starts out as a baby with a neural net processor attached to its brain, providing an uplink to Skynet. Because of I-950's almost purely organic nature it is harder to detect using metal detectors and is undetected by dogs.

In robotics the approach of neural networks is called the "bottom-up approach." In today's modern robots, 100 artifical neurons is exceptional. However a human for example has over 100 billion neurons.

1. Used in Twilight Zone, episode "No Time Like The Past":
1. A man travels back in time to discover the cause of a famous fire. While in the building where the fire started, he accidentally knocks over a kerosene lantern and causes a fire, the same fire that would inspire him, years later, to travel back in time.
2. A man travels back in time and impregnates his great-great-grandmother. She would thus give birth to one of the man's great-grandparents, who would then give birth to his grandmother or grandfather, who would then be able to give birth to one of the man's parents, and finally to the man himself who would have to travel back in time in order to ensure his own existence.

The T-X travels back in time and injects the T-1 with data from the future. This T-1 then uploads the data to Skynet, which then disseminates the data to anything on the world grid, thus giving Skynet self-awareness and sentience, who would then send the T-X back in time in order to ensure its own existence.

In Terminator 2, Sarah Connor is able to stop the development of SkyNet by destroying the remains of the first Terminator as well as the Cyberdyne building. This should have rendered the future unwritten, but in 2003 a third Terminator, the T-X, was sent to kill important leaders in Connor's army. Judgment Day had merely been postponed and now took place in 2003 as opposed to 1997.

This alternation to the timeline may have drastically changed the future outcome of the war; for all we know, Connor's forces may not have shut down SkyNet in 2029. As well, it remains unrevealed how much of future history SkyNet itself knows. Did the sending of the lone Terminator back to 1984 cause changes to manifest in 2029 which resulted in the T-1000 to be sent back to 1994 which then in turn further changed the timeline so SkyNet would send the T-X back to 2003?

The possession of sapience is not a necessity. The word sentient is often confused with the word sapient, which can connote knowledge, consciousness, or apperception. The root of the confusion is that the word conscious has a number of different usages in English. The two words can be distinguished by looking at their Latin roots: sentire, "to feel"; and sapere, "to know".

Skynet is a fictional example of an artificial intelligence that becomes sentient(see definition on this page), and turns on its creators. Skynet has yet to appear on screen in the film series, but has appeared in spin-off media, particularly in video games and in the theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time.

Skynet is also involved in a complex time travel grandfather paradox (see definition on this page), responsible for its own creation as well as alternate future timelines.

The T-1 is portrayed by three full-scale remote controlled robots, the only difference from its movie counterpart being that it is not artificially intelligent or armed with weapons. Its design is loosely anthropomorphic, a "head" with sensors for eyes, gatling guns for arms, a "torso" that swivels like a human one, and caterpillar tracks for legs. While it is quite large, it is small enough to get around typical office building corridors. The T-1s are given the designations of "T1-n", with n being a sequential number for each one.

While knowledge from past time-travel has advanced the rate of terminator development, an Infiltrator terminator with what appears to be rubber skin also exists in Cameron Philips's future. This has been confirmed as the first on screen sighting of a T-600

This Terminator was destroyed when it removed its power cell and set it to overload in the mouth of the T-X, thus destroying both machines.

In Terminator 2, the T-1000 is presented as a technological leap over the "Model 101" Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Schwarzenegger's character explains how the T-1000 is a more advanced terminator. It can absorb damage better, and physically mimic specific humans and other objects. Furthermore, it can use its advanced composition in innovative and surprising ways, including fitting through narrow openings, walking through prison bars, and flattening itself on the ground to hide.

In the producer interview from Starlog Magazine, it was originally planned to have the T-Meg be composed of a large group of T-1000s forming themselves together.

With the success of the mimetic poly-alloy T-1000 Series, Skynet continued to develop its liquid metal technology, this time combining it with an advanced endoskeleton, similar in shape and structure to that of the Series 900. The resultant T-X Series is stronger, faster, more intelligent, and more deadly than any of Skynet's other battle units, effectively making them redundant.

Due to the T-X's default form being that of a young female, John Connor dubs the T-X the "Terminatrix".

The term was not used in James Cameron's original script treatment [ need confirmation of this].
However, in the Terminator ancillary material, such as video games and comic books, Tech-Com has come to be used as the name for the human resistance against Skynet and the machines.

The name Tech-Com was also used by Cameron Phillips (T:SCC)to describe Derek Reese's operation specialty.

The phrase Tech-Com is often used in the books and video games as a synonym for the Resistance. It is not clear if this term is canon.

Its main purpose was to fight the Skynet system, and to preserve the human race from ending. The Resistance carried out many missions attacking factories and breaking humans out of Skynet Work Camps. To even the battle, weapons were stolen and terminators were reprogrammed to help the Resistance.

As stated by Kyle Reese in The Terminator, the Resistance triumphed over Skynet, and in a last ditch effort the computer system sent back a Terminator to kill Sarah Connor, somehow creating a predestination paradox (see definition on this page) that enabled it to survive.

• Supreme General John Connor
• Second In-Command Katherine "Kate" Brewster-Connor
• Lieutenant General Robert Brewster (deceased)
• Colonel Steve Earle (deceased)
• Colonel Gabriel Stone (deceased)
• Colonel Jackson
• Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Parsons (deceased)
• Captain Justin Perry
• First Lieutenant Derek Thomas Reese
• Lieutenant Joel Benson (deceased)
• Lieutenant Tom Carter
• Lieutenant Catherine Luna
• Sergeant Doogie "Watchdog" Harris
• Sergeant Kyle Reese (deceased)
• Sergeant Toni Battaglia (deceased)
• Corporal Bill Taggart (deceased)
• Corporal Simon Anders (deceased)
• Private Alexander Stone (Traitor)
• Doctor Daniel "Danny" Dyson
• Doctor Donald Hess (deceased)
• Alice Skerrit
• Daniel (deceased)
• Danny Avila
• David "Ten" Zimmerman
• Elizabeth "Liz" Anderson (deceased)
• Griff (deceased)
• Jane Benson (deceased)
• Jose Barrera (deceased)
• Paul Keeley
• Sumner (deceased)
• William "Bill" Anderson (deceased)
• William Wisher (Andrew Goode) (deceased)

Although time travel has been a common plot device in fiction since the 19th century, and one-way travel into the future is arguably possible given the phenomenon of time dilation based on velocity in the theory of special relativity (exemplified by the twin paradox) as well as gravitational time dilation in the theory of general relativity, it is currently unknown whether the laws of physics would allow backwards time travel. Any technological device, whether fictional or hypothetical, that is used to achieve two-way time travel is known as a time machine.

Picture at left is an artist rendition of a black hole.
The current thinking is Black holes can be used to travel into the future only. So far as we know, our universe prohibits traveling into the past.

According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, and to experimental evidence here on earth assembled by Harvard physicists Pound and Rebka, in the presence of a gravitational field, an external observer would see a clock in a strong gravitational field tick more slowly. This is analogous to the famous time dilation effect in special relativity, except that in the 'gravitational redshift' effect no motion between the observer outside the gravitational field and the clock located within the field, is required.

What this means is that if you were traveling into a strong gravitational field and sending out pulses of light every second, an observer watching these signals from a great distance would see the interval between the pulses increase from seconds to minutes and then hours as the field got stronger and stronger.

Wormholes are also permitted by the Einstein field equations of general relativity, although it would be impossible to travel through a wormhole unless it was what is known as a "traversable wormhole".

A proposed time-travel machine using a traversable wormhole would (hypothetically) work in the following way: One end of the wormhole is accelerated to some significant fraction of the speed of light, perhaps with some advanced propulsion system, and then brought back to the point of origin. Alternatively, another way is to take one entrance of the wormhole and move it to within the gravitational field of an object that has higher gravity than the other entrance, and then return it to a position near the other entrance. For both of these methods, time dilation causes the end of the wormhole that has been moved to have aged less than the stationary end, as seen by an external observer; however, time connects differently through the wormhole than outside it, so that synchronized clocks at either end of the wormhole will always remain synchronized as seen by an observer passing through the wormhole, no matter how the two ends move around.[19] This means that an observer entering the accelerated end would exit the stationary end when the stationary end was the same age that the accelerated end had been at the moment before entry; for example, if prior to entering the wormhole the observer noted that a clock at the accelerated end read a date of 2007 while a clock at the stationary end read 2012, then the observer would exit the stationary end when its clock also read 2007, a trip backwards in time as seen by other observers outside. One significant limitation of such a time machine is that it is only possible to go as far back in time as the initial creation of the machine;in essence, it is more of a path through time than it is a device that itself moves through time, and it would not allow the technology itself to be moved backwards in time. This could provide an alternative explanation for Hawking's observation: a time machine will be built someday, but has not yet been built, so the tourists from the future cannot reach this far back in time.