A Boy's Best Friend

"A Boy's Best Friend" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov, published in 1975. It has been collected in The Complete Robot and first appeared in Boys' Life, March 1975.[1]

For the song "A Boy's Best Friend" by The White Stripes, see De Stijl (album).

"A Boy's Best Friend"
AuthorIsaac Asimov
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Science fiction
Published inBoys' Life
Publication dateMarch 1975

Plot summary

Jimmy’s family is settled on the Moon. Since Jimmy was born on the Moon, he is greatly accustomed to life and dangers on the Moon. Robutt, a robot-dog, was Jimmy’s companion. One day his father decided to bring a real dog from the earth. He hoped that a real dog is better than Robutt. However, Jimmy was not happy to get a real dog because he had become greatlt attached to Robutt

Quoting Asimov himself, "you may find in it (the story) a distant echo of Robbie". That story, written 35 years before, also involves a relationship between a child and a robot.

gollark: I've made a bit of a frontend for my search engine thing. Though it can't actually do search yet, only crawl/index/whatever pages.
gollark: Basically, if I want to run a search it just goes `SELECT * FROM page_tokens WHERE token = 'one token in search query'` or something like that, and it now has a list of pages with the right token, and SQLite can execute this query relatively fast.
gollark: I mean, as far as I can tell there isn't really a faster *and* more storage-efficient way to do search than the inverted-index page_tokens thing.
gollark: ```sqlCREATE TABLE crawl_queue ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, url TEXT NOT NULL UNIQUE, lockTime INTEGER, added INTEGER NOT NULL, referrer TEXT);CREATE TABLE pages ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, url TEXT NOT NULL UNIQUE, rawContent BLOB NOT NULL, rawFormat TEXT NOT NULL, textContent TEXT NOT NULL, updated INTEGER NOT NULL);CREATE TABLE page_tokens ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, page INTEGER NOT NULL REFERENCES pages(id), token TEXT NOT NULL, weight REAL NOT NULL);CREATE TABLE links ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, toURL TEXT NOT NULL, fromURL TEXT NOT NULL, lastSeen INTEGER NOT NULL, UNIQUE (toURL, fromURL))```Here is the database.
gollark: To be fair, the text content field isn't that necessary, as for search it uses the page_tokens table anyway and it can be rebuilt from the HTML if I need it.

References
  1. "A Boy's Best Friend". Good Reads.


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