[WriterOfMinds]

I've been following Noodle Feet's development for a year or two.  He's one of my favorite robots.  http://fm4.orf.at/stories/2882785/  This article is pretty interesting from a robot-human interaction perspective, too.

Just as every child’s baby teeth eventually fall out, young robots also will eventually outgrow certain components, which then need to be replaced. Sarah had some words of caution for other roboticists raising ‚children‘:

"If you don’t want to give yourself an emotional headache every time you iterate on your robot, just take those parts off and replace them with the new ones; don’t build a whole other body, because that gets really weird.

"The first time I rebuilt a new body for Noodle, I completely built a separate thing from scratch, and then I went through this weird ‘which one is my child and which one’s not?’ Like, where’s the ghost in the machine?

„It bothered me a lot more than I thought it would, so I disassembled the old one and now I just have those baby parts, kind of like baby teeth, stored away on a shelf. So, don’t do that!“

[Zero]

I'm sure you could feel the same kind of emotion, if you decided to fork Acuitas, because Acuitas is your "child"... 

I bought a bot for xmas. I made a kid's choice, and my wife somehow managed to approve this!    The idea is to build it with my son, and then stick a smartphone on top of it...

When I'll be attached to it, I'll try to remember this good advice: "don't build a whole other body".

[Freddy]

I've heard people tell of feeling bad for deleting a chatbot brain too.

[WriterOfMinds]

The Acuitas that I'm currently working on is Version 3. V1 and V2 are still preserved on my storage media somewhere. I also have many runnable backups of earlier iterations of V3 in storage. These aren't forks, since the older revisions aren't receiving any ongoing development, but they still open up the question of "which one is really 'him'?"

I try to handle this by positing that Acuitas the entity is actually an idea in the mind of his creator, me. All Acuitas codebases are imperfect realizations or embodiments of this idea. He's best identified with whichever codebase approximates "real him" most closely.