Although he knew Raven 12345's judgment was usually accurate, Hao Ren still couldn't help responding when he heard the word "intuition": "By the way, is your intuition reliable?"
Raven 12345 shot him a withering look. "What nonsense. Woman's intuition plus a goddess's intuition—do you think that's reliable or not?"
Hao Ren thought about it, thinking, Why not add a lunatic's intuition to the list while you're at it? But he managed to swallow the words in the end and changed the subject instead. "In your opinion, what exactly is this network missing? What is it used for?"
"Didn't I already say? I can't explain it either." Raven 12345 frowned. "But I can be certain that the network isn't operating normally, and that's not because you failed to stimulate it enough during your experiments. It's because the network is fundamentally incomplete. Look at how this information proliferates and gets relayed—all the data is actually meaningless exchange. It merely follows the network's own physical structure, copying and relaying itself between nodes, then naturally vanishing after passing through a certain number of nodes. Nowhere in the entire process can we see any effective data processing or storage."
Hao Ren looked thoughtful. "So that's why I haven't been able to decipher this network..."
"Mm, that's the key to the problem." Raven 12345 nodded. "...If I had to put it into words, I think the network is missing a 'program,' or an 'operating system.' It's missing a command source capable of coordinating the whole system and issuing orders to every node, or perhaps a set of computational rules that takes effect automatically. But I can't determine whether this command source exists physically or virtually."
Hao Ren asked curiously, "What's the difference between the two?"
"If it exists physically, it might be a special node, such