"Isn't that wrong?" Youji frowned. "Master, that doesn't seem right. In board games... and, and driving, computers are much better than Biological Brains."
Xiang Shan nodded. "That's right, but a computer that's good at chess can only play chess. It will never understand the question of 'why play chess,' and may not even know that it is 'playing chess.' If its creator gives it no instructions, then it will never do a second thing for the rest of its life."
This should have been... a very, very long time ago, right? Xiang Shan felt that this history might have taken place before he was even born. Back then, there was a conductor. He had trisomy 21 syndrome—what people called a "congenitally foolish child." Perhaps he had merely been born into a musical family and treated "imitating conducting movements" as a game, but he had indeed taken the stage as a "conductor." Did "music" exist within his brain?
Perhaps it did. Perhaps that poor man truly understood what music was.
But beyond "music," he could not understand much else.
The intelligence bred within computers was even more extreme. After all, even congenitally foolish children knew hunger and thirst. They cried when their bodies felt unwell. But even an AI whose chess skill could crush a chess saint would never think, "I need power," or "I just want more computing resources."
"Actually, there has never been anything a computer could do that exceeded the human brain. Calculations on paper... Damn, you probably don't even know what 'paper' is." Xiang Shan shook his head, casually picked up an iron rod, and wrote q and p on the ground.
Two values: 1 or 0, TRUE or FALSE.
Two gave birth to three, and three gave birth to all things.
Everything in computers came from this.
"What I'm going to teach you now is called 'Boolean operation.'" Xiang Shan said, "With an iron rod, humans can perform Boolean operations on the ground and thereby simulate any computer program—no, it should be the other way around. Computers merely replace human hands, writing Boolean expressions on the ground. They're simply faster than human handwriting. Faster and faster. That's all."
"This method of operation was born from the great George Boole. Before George Boole, Leibniz and Babbage had been doing the same thing—they tried to use machines to calculate. Babbage may once have come close to this realm, but ultimately failed to reach it. But Boole was unlike all those who came before him. Just as Isaac Newton tried to describe the trajectories of matter through the dimensions of time and space, Boole tried to describe the trajectories of thought. It was an earth-shattering achievement. Of course, the gap between Boolean algorithms and genuine human thought was like the gap between Newtonian Mechanics and the real world. But this was already a beginning."
"After Boole, people realized that gears and levers could perform calculations, neural networks could perform calculations, circuits constantly opening and closing could perform calculations, and even a pile of chemical equipment could perform calculations—Boolean algorithms broke down one corner of human thought into something machines could understand."
The history of humans using circuits to simulate neural networks and perform Boolean calculations even predated the von Neumann architecture—back in 1943, neurobiologist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts created the first artificial neural network capable of performing Boolean calculations.
And before Boole's era, there was another inventor named Joseph Jacquard. He invented an entirely new kind of loom. It used punched cards to control the needles and threads on the machine, weaving warp and weft. Similar things had appeared independently many times throughout history. Such "punched cards" could even be traced back to China's Eastern Han dynasty.
This was the ancestor of the Turing Machine's "punched paper tape," the most primitive memory device with only a few bytes, the earliest "memory" of machines.
And the plan Hilbert proposed to study pure mathematics propelled the birth of the Turing Machine.
In the end, these results all converged in the hands of another man named von Neumann.
Thus, a tool unprecedented in human history was born. Human society, life, politics, and military affairs were all changed by it.
"But a tool is still a tool." Xiang Shan warned his disciple. "Its essence is merely the creation of thousands, tens of thousands of arms to perform Boolean operations for you. Anything a computer can do, you yourself can do with Boolean operations. The computer is merely faster—though of course, that 'speed' has already become a fundamental change."
"For ordinary users, all you need to do is hand a task to those 'many arms' and wait for the result. But you can't cultivate Inner Power that way. Someone whose Inner Power has reached fruition can maximize the strength of those countless arms, even transmit their will between those hands."
"So you must begin with Boolean operations."
In the realm of Inner Power, mathematics was the "Way," and Boolean operations were the "one."
The Way gave birth to one, one gave birth to two, two gave birth to three, and three gave birth to all things.
Boolean algorithms themselves were not complicated, merely extensions of logic. Mathematics at roughly a high school level was enough to get started.
The rest was simply a great deal of practice.
Xiang Shan spent some time explaining the essence of these matters to Youji, then directly compiled a workbook in his mind and transmitted it point-to-point into Youji's brain chip.
Youji's steps were extremely heavy as he left the room.
Xiang Shan nodded in satisfaction. He had a feeling—he had wanted to try doing this for a long time.
He did not know why. Perhaps it was the influence of his past experiences?
In any case, he was quite happy.
Youji finally finished the exercises and returned to his room.
Then he discovered that the atmosphere in the room had completely changed.
Xiang Shan sat before the terminal with his eyes closed, as though meditating. Countless symbols appeared and vanished in refreshing waves across the terminal screen. More code overlaid the code already there.
The canine-shaped prosthetic connected to the terminal was making all kinds of movements.
Xiang Shan was comprehending the meaning of every line of code, then replacing the original code with his own.
He intended to master this component he had never seen before.
"Youji, have you finished the exercises?" Xiang Shan maintained his original posture. "Is your brain chip the kind that can be removed at any time? Would it be convenient to let me take a look at one now?"
Youji nodded. "It can be..."
He lowered his head, and the rear section of his skull opened. Then, a backup chip popped out.
A prosthetic's driver chips always came in two or more. When one encountered a BUG and crashed, the other would instantly take over the body. At the same time, the one with the BUG would rapidly watchdog and restart.
This was different from Xiang Shan's integrated skull. Youji's modern artificial skull was designed to open conveniently.
Youji handed his backup chip to Xiang Shan. "Master, what are you doing?"
"I'll be done soon. I'll tell you after I'm done." Xiang Shan shook his head. Failing to notice this at first had truly been too careless of him. In this era, the power the strong held over the lives and deaths of the weak was even more severe than he had imagined. He had only discovered that Doctor Schultz had invited him onto the internet, so he had naively concluded that most cybernetic prosthetics were not connected to the network at all times.
When he had taken Youji as his disciple, he had only thought of avoiding the village's surveillance routes.
But what the mayor had said earlier reminded him.
No matter what society was like, never underestimate how tyrants plundered people.
In truth, there should still be a frequency band that ordinary people did not know about, or simply could not use. On that non-civilian frequency band, all prosthetics were connected to the network—it was simply that the users of those prosthetics did not know it.
The only thing worth being thankful for was that the current "true ruling group" seemed short-handed, or faced some other objective difficulty, and could not monitor every person at every moment.
Tch... It probably wasn't this bad in the past.
But I should have imagined this extreme state before.
"Practice martial arts without cultivating Inner Power, and in the end it all comes to nothing." From the very beginning, the design of Inner Power had included the idea of resisting such a state.
Therefore, after restoring a little of his own Inner Power, Xiang Shan began building Youji's defenses against external evil and clearing the backdoors from his chip.
Very quickly, Xiang Shan searched through the entire chip. Just as he had expected, there were indeed several protocols inside that he had never seen before, pointing toward certain ports with signal-transmission capabilities.
These ports used shortwave communication. Their signals were relatively weak, and their data transmission capacity limited. They could probably only upload low-quality audio or images.
But that meant the rulers really could spy on any individual at any time.
"Good. At least it's fortunate that this era has no military or police force, and the lords have far too much discretionary power... At most, they can only realize that I might be a Vagrant."
Xiang Shan quickly wrote a firewall into Youji's chip, making it reject remote access through that specific port and transmit fabricated images instead. Then he erased several other protocols.
Of course, before doing any of this, he made backups first.
Xiang Shan returned the chip to Youji. "Try it yourself. Tell me if anything feels wrong. If there are no problems, help me with something later."
Xiang Shan was currently controlling his own prosthetic through the cheap chip the mayor had given him. That driver chip might also contain a backdoor. Xiang Shan's artificial skull could not open and close freely like Youji's. Without special tools, he would need someone else's help to remove the inserted chip.
That was equivalent to exposing his own brain to someone else. Xiang Shan needed an assistant he could trust before he dared do such a thing.
Furthermore, he had to prevent a situation where "halfway through, the assistant gets remotely brain-controlled, their finger twitches, and they poke straight into his brain." That was why he had prioritized preparing an Empowerment for Youji.
While transmitting his mathematics homework to Xiang Shan for inspection, Youji followed Xiang Shan's instructions, running and jumping to test whether the driver chip had any BUGs.
Humans had learned long ago not to pursue programming with no BUGs. As long as a program could run, the existence of BUGs did not matter.
According to type theory, high-level languages could roughly be divided into "type-unsafe languages," "type-safe languages," and "strongly normalizing languages." Strongly normalizing languages could guarantee that "nothing goes wrong." For any program, such languages could produce a unique result and halt; they would absolutely never fall into an infinite loop. But precisely because strongly normalizing languages abandoned the concept of "loops," they lost Turing completeness, so any erroneous system would simply not be recognized and would not be allowed to run.
Simply put, a strongly normalizing language was one where "if the program runs, then absolutely nothing can go wrong—but if there is even the tiniest error in it, it cannot run."
Vagrants, on the other hand, tended to use "type-unsafe languages." The users of such languages lived daily in confusion: My code won't run? Why is that? My code runs? Why is that? Such languages could easily produce "unpredictable errors"—and that "unpredictability" could be said to be ordained by mathematics itself. Before the program ran, even its author could not predict it.
Of course, this "difficulty in understanding" applied equally to enemies.
Xiang Shan would rather go through more trouble and conduct several tests before writing any program than choose a "type-unsafe language."
But Xiang Shan's skill seemed genuinely decent. Youji's driver chip could still control his prosthetic normally.