Tech Hammer

Du Shaodong was looking at the report in front of him.

Even though the school as a whole was lagging behind in responding to public opinion, he still felt the positive impact after such a long time.

In fact, there is no need to feel it.

He had already received several calls from big guys from his brother's schools, and the congratulations had a bit of a sour taste in them, which was very refreshing.

And when he saw the specific report, his heart skipped a beat.

After Ning Wei's performance at the conference became a hot event in China, Jiangsu University's search index on major search engines has greatly improved both year-on-year and month-on-month, and the number of inquiries from the admissions office has skyrocketed.

Moreover, it has only just entered March, and it has not yet reached the serious enrollment period. If this kind of popularity can be maintained, it will have a positive impact on the school's enrollment this year.

But the more I looked at it, the more frustrated I became.

From his perspective as a principal, the value Ning Wei has shown at this time has already exceeded the honors brought to the school by publishing a few top journal papers and participating in a top international conference.

This kind of enthusiasm brought to the school by public discussion is likely to improve the quality of students in the next one to several years. From the school's perspective, this is more valuable than a few papers with the school's name on it.

The reason for the frustration is that the school will most likely not be able to retain such a student who can be used as a poster child.

Ning Wei and Yanbei University have been flirting with each other for more than a day or two, let alone hiding it. And all of this happened after he had a conversation with Ning Weishen, and he had promised the best conditions.

How could you not be bored?

So Du Shaodong picked up the phone.

"Old Kong, Ning Wei hasn't expressed his position yet? Shouldn't your institute also be more active?"

"Principal Du, I have done all the work that I should do here, but it is not easy to force people to give up the opportunity to study at Yanbei University, right? Do you think our professors in the School of Mathematics don't want to keep people? How can this matter? It’s no wonder that our school is responsible! If the Graduate Admissions Office hadn’t blocked his school’s application for recommendation and exemption at that time, wouldn’t he have been retained by us long ago?”

This makes sense, and Principal Du cannot refute it.

After hanging up the phone with a bang, Du Shaodong called the graduate school. After asking about the situation in a calm tone, he asked: "There was a teacher Xue from the Graduate Admissions Office who was still in school?"

"Yes, but he has been transferred from his original position and is now responsible for the maintenance of the media laboratory."

"Oh, that's right. Recently I heard some people say that the administrative positions in some scientific academies' laboratories are seriously exceeded. Is this the case?"

"The administrative post in the laboratory exceeds the standard? Oh, yes, I have also heard about this problem. I will communicate with the logistics department and ask them to check themselves first?"

"Yes! As soon as possible! Report the results directly to me!"

"Okay, Principal Du!"

After hanging up the phone, I felt a little less angry, but seemed more depressed.

…

Ning Wei, who was still in the United States, didn't know that his speech at the SODA conference was like a roc flapping its wings dozens of times, blowing the wind thousands of miles away.

After dragging Yu Xingwei back to the room, he opened his laptop.

Professor Shen is right!

It is indeed easy to spark ideas when communicating with peers. For example, communicating with Lucy Rowan made his thinking much clearer.

He wants to write a program, a program that relies on precise floating point operations but can randomly choose the direction of evolution and finally hatch.

This is definitely much more interesting than Schrödinger's cat. It's more like opening a blind box. Before the blind box chooses and hatches a state on its own, even the person who created the program doesn't know what will pop out of the box. .

So even though the code of the program hasn't been typed yet, Ning Wei has already thought of a name for this small program, and it's called Ning Wei's Black Box.

Sure enough, when he was immersed in this program, he once again found the comfort of crazy output.

This time is also different from tinkering with turbulence algorithms and trying to get an EDA project, because he can complete all the coding work alone without help.

Because according to the idea in the brain, this program code itself is not very complicated. What is complicated and even exquisite is the mathematical ideas and structure contained in it.

"Mr. Xiao Ning, what kind of trouble are you trying to make?"

Seeing Ning Wei rushing into the room, opening his notebook and starting to work, Yu Xingwei refused to see this scene from the bottom of his heart.

He hopes Ning Wei can behave more normally, such as watching American blockbusters with him and discussing the aesthetics of violence under old American lenses. After finally taking a trip, why can't he relax his body and mind and have a spiritual spa?

If that doesn't work, they can go to the dinner party to hang out and communicate with the bosses!

What is the difference between holding a computer and typing code in a hotel in an American tourist city, and working in a laboratory?

Well, the essence of this matter is that when you see someone who is already better than him and works harder than him, it is very easy for people to feel a negative emotion called despair!

However, Ning Wei's answer made Yu Xingwei realize that his inner worries were facts.

"The inspiration came to me. After discussing it with Lucy, I felt that I might be able to write a program that can be called the originator of artificial intelligence."

Hearing this answer…

Yu Xingwei was really about to become depressed.

However, Ning Wei's performance made him even more depressed, because this guy was really immersed in the world of programming and ignored his depression at all.

Ah……

This is called genius!

…

Just as Feng Shaojie predicted, people started leaving one after another starting from the second day of the meeting.

There are even fewer presenters in the POSTER Hall.

Especially for many people who come to the conference at their own expense, every extra day of food and accommodation is a big burden. Of course, more people choose to leave simply because they have heard what they want to hear, and there is no need to waste time on it. During the meeting, the extra time is better spent wandering around and having fun.

But Yu Xingwei could only stay in the room for most of two days in a row, playing with his mobile phone and accompanying Ning Wei, who was competing with a program that was the so-called originator of artificial intelligence.

During this period, Professor Shen came to visit once, and Feng Shaojie also came to chat with him several times, but Ning Wei always just said hello and then went about his own business there.

Lucy Rowan came twice, and the two had extremely in-depth exchanges. No, it should be said that they went from discussions to quarrels...

It is a real academic dispute.

This once again refreshed Yu Xingwei's understanding of Ning Wei. Ning Wei, who had always been quite gentle, actually defended his views uncompromisingly over a complex random number sampling issue...

He even rudely said something that made Yu Xingwei feel extremely awesome when he thought about it: "Ms. Ron, I admit that you have made great achievements in your own research field, but you probably wasted too much time on it. Maintain your so-called charm to the opposite sex, and make your understanding of some advanced mathematical ideas as naive as a newborn baby! The wasted attention even eats away at your thoughts! Burn all your piles of evening gowns, they will be exchanged for The praise will only make you go further and further down the stupid road!"

Hearing this, Yu Xingwei was still glad that the two of them were communicating in English, otherwise he would suspect that Ning Wei would have directly replaced the word "stupid" with "big-chested and brainless"!

But the results were no different.

This female Harvard doctor turned around angrily and left the room. The sound of the door closing as she left could probably make the entire floor tremble!

However, Ningwei continued to sit in front of his computer and continue programming as if nothing had happened in the next moment...

A 23-year-old female Ph.D. from Harvard, the official darling of a prestigious Ivy League university...

After seeing this scene, Yu Xingwei even secretly rejoiced in his heart. Fortunately, this meeting was not in Cambridge, where Harvard University is located. Otherwise, he would have doubts about whether Ning Wei and him would be able to walk out of Harvard upright...

This also made Yu Xingwei more interested in Ning Wei's tormenting procedures.

What is it? Can a gentle child become so violent?

Fortunately, it didn't keep him curious for too long. On the third night of the conference, he was holding his mobile phone and posting pictures obtained through various methods in the group to describe the decadent capital to his hard-working colleagues in the laboratory. When he was living a socialist life, Ning Wei finally stood up from the computer on his own initiative without the need to eat or eliminate physiological waste.

"Done? So quickly?" Yu Xingwei asked in surprise.

Although he knew very well that Ning Wei was definitely a fast shooter in the coding world, and even more clearly knew how efficient he was, he still felt that it was too fast to be worthy of the term "program, the originator of artificial intelligence".

"Isn't it too fast? There are only tens of thousands of lines of code in total, and the encapsulated program is not too difficult for me." Ning Wei stretched out and replied.

Yu Xingwei believes this very much. Ning Wei's reputation as a fast coder is well known in the laboratory.

"Can I see it?"

"Of course! This is it..."

Ning Wei opened the program casually, and what Yu Xingwei saw was a square three-dimensional black box, so simple that it had no interactive interface.

"That's it?" Yu Xingwei was confused.

"You dare to underestimate it?" Ning Wei asked.

"No, this is not something I should take lightly. You tell me this is a program that will exist like the originator of artificial intelligence in the future?" This time Yu Xingwei really felt that his IQ was insulted.

"You first look at the CPU utilization."

"Huh? It's almost at full capacity, isn't it? Such a program consumes so many resources, is it considered an advantage?" Yu Xingwei was still confused.

After all, this means that after running this program, if you want to run other programs, you will feel extremely awkward, and may even directly cause the system to blue screen and freeze.

Haven't you heard the laptop fan whirring?

Ning Wei thought for a while and explained: "Don't underestimate it. Really, I purchased 3TB of cloud space specifically for it. But that's not the point. The data crawling selection and conversion process will also consume a lot of traffic. Thank you This hotel has WIFI, and the speed is pretty good, otherwise the money given by the school would probably not be enough to purchase the data. In addition, my computer configuration is also a bit poor, so now I don’t know if it can achieve the expected results."

"But what you need to know is that at this time, it is completing the self-incubation process of intelligent life through this computer at a speed of about two billion operations per second. Let's put it this way, you know Apple's SIRI and Google's Google Assistant, right? "

Yu Xingwei nodded.

"Perhaps when it completes its self-evolution, its conversational capabilities will be able to appear more intelligent than them without the help of huge servers in the background. Of course, this is only a possibility. There may be other possibilities. The public database of the World Wide Web is It is the carrier for obtaining nutrients. This is what excites me the most about this software, because I don’t know what kind of surprises it will bring to me after it independently captures data, selects paths, and iteratively updates countless times. .”

To be honest, although Yu Xingwei has a doctorate in computer science, through this very abstract description, he actually doesn't quite understand what kind of program it is. But it sounds really cool.

But now it seems that the waiting time has been extended again.

"Wait until this time tomorrow. The limited time is twenty-four hours. For the current computing power of this laptop, twenty-four hours is enough. We will know what it will look like by then. But it may also fail. After all, this is my first attempt. The only trouble is that this software requires too much computing power, and it is not very valuable for promotion and application without specialized hardware matching."

Ning Wei said with regret, and then looked at Yu Xingwei: "Brother Yu, for example, would you buy a computer and rent about ten TB of space every year just to support this software? Or rent it directly? A server, raising it?”

Yu Xingwei shook his head honestly, and then added: "Unless I have so much money that I'm burning through it, no, even if I have so much money that I'm burning through it, what can I do? If I have to buy a computer, I'll just run it." software."

"So." Ning Wei shrugged.

"However, if tomorrow's results amaze me and I have too much money to burn, I might really buy it. After all, it is quite expensive to ask someone to chat with me, and it may evolve language skills later than SIRI and Google Assistant are still powerful. Of course, in addition to me, Apple and Google will do the same, and their servers are more expensive! But the first condition is, can you guarantee this?" Yu Xingwei asked.

Ning Wei thought for a while, then shook his head and said: "I really don't dare to do this, because maybe there will be nothing when I open it in the end, but the cloud space is full of data, or the things that evolved may not have any language ability, but Being able to see the world through a camera and having the ability to grasp key points like a human brain, there are many possibilities, but I don’t know the final result.”

"So, let's wait until tomorrow. Besides, tomorrow is the last day of the meeting. Can we go out for a walk?"

Staying in the hotel room for two consecutive days really suffocated Yu Xingwei.

In the laboratory, I can still go out and walk around the campus. In the hotel, I have to watch Ning Wei. He really doesn't dare to go out!

"Don't we have to stay another day the day after tomorrow? Aren't you excited about what this program will eventually hatch? Believe me, this is really worth looking forward to." Ning Wei shook his head and said excitedly.

Is it worth the wait? !

Maybe……

Fortunately, twenty-four hours is actually not that long, and during the day, Ning Wei was pulled out of the room by Yu Xingwei, and went to two small venues with a hundred people to listen to the reports. In this way, he spent the whole day and finally got through it. At nine o'clock in the evening, Yu Xingwei stood next to Ning Wei, staring at the three-dimensional black box on the screen...

"How did this thing change?"

“It’s just a click away!”

"Then you should hurry up!" But Yu Xingwei was so anxious that he had been waiting all day to see what kind of thing Ning Wei could hatch...

"Okay!" After saying that, Ning Wei moved the mouse with a sacred look and clicked on the black box...