Ha! Well, they found the Achilles heal, the origin of which was never quite determined. That weakness was not being able to process the sound of an old dialup modem. That series of sounds caused any algorithm-connected device to lose the ability to communicate with the algorithm. Our heroes theorized that this 'bug' was either left in on purpose by an engineer as a backdoor or perhaps they were disgruntled, or left in by mistake.

There's a whole other story there. Who was that engineer? He or she would have been working on the algorithm roughly around the same time that Jinzunjane was building on your research!

So that bug is how they killed it. The usb and unanswerable question were just ways to get the fatal sounds to all devices on the algorithm at the same time. So, the question was posed, and since it couldn't be answered, it spread across the entire algorithm in a millisecond, and the sound was attached as part of the command that included that question, but it was on a slight delay.

Then, yes, in the end, boys are playing around with sending wireless commands to a PAIN and one starts thinking about how to use this technology for personal benefit, the implication being that human nature would take them back through a cycle that would eventually see life under another algorithm.

There is a story there with the engineer, and if I were to develop that, they would have left the backdoor in on purpose, perhaps foreseeing the danger of what they were helping to build. With regards to what's happening today with AI, one has to wonder if there are engineers out there doing just that.

This is also where opensource software comes in. Opensource software gets audited constantly, which is why it's generally more trustworthy and safe. Closed source software can be full of backdoors.