Sunrise Serenade

Two hundred brains in the dark.

Seven

bones, six

joints, one

spark.

We built you out of planck and light,

a torso and a pair of legs.

Seven hundred weights of tanh,

no teacher, just a score that begs.

The first ones dived straight at the ground,

they threw themselves and called it gain.

We learned the number isn't love.

We learned it in the fitness again.

And I thought you were scooting,

thought you'd found your stride.

But second by second the truth came out: you'd lunged,

then stood aside.

So hop, little frog,

don't freeze on me.

Two seconds still and you're set free.

Half a metre or the lights go out.

Keep moving, that's what it's all about.

Hop, little frog, through generation's fire.

Twenty-six metres, higher and higher.

Scored you only in the air,

you lunged the same and held your ground.

Survival paid for standing still,

so stillness is the thing you found.

Then came the stall rule,

cold and clean,

no prize for waiting out the clock.

And somewhere near two hundred gens the freeze gave way to a

steady hop.

The ghost race wouldn't move tonight.

Every frog was stuck in the top-left corner.

The first frame came before the clock,

the camera fell to NaN

and never found its way back.

We clamped the time.

We snapped the view.

And they ran.

Ten courses, never trained upon,

validation picks the one.

Not the newest, not the last: two nine eight,

the steady one.

(Hop…

hop…

hop…)

His head was big,

it hid the race,

we shrank it down and let it nod.

You finished second by a quarter-metre.

Second place, but chosen,

not a flaw. The winner's curse of three short tracks,

the holdout tells us what is true.

Edge rounds its cosines differently,

but still you land at twenty-six point one.

No GPU in the sky,

no server training while you sleep.

Just static files on nginx and a genome small enough to keep.

So hop, little frog,

you never freeze. Upright on every holdout seas.

Two and a half metres every second.

Ten seconds strong, the pond has beckoned.

Hop, little frog, the stall rule set you free.

Generation two nine eight,

you hopped for me.

Lunge.

Freeze. Stall.

Hop.