At first, Li Chen had not seen it clearly, but he gradually understood. What Lu Chen was demonstrating was the product of a set of numbers. As the abdomens of the Nightwalker Insects brightened and dimmed one after another, a full four hundred and ninety of them finally folded their wings, leaving only the sixteen in the foremost row shining in neat formation.
Li Chen's eyes lit up. "Two to the sixteenth power, minus one!"
This was precisely the result of a phase-shift multiplication that matched his line of thinking. Although it was only a simple calculation, the insect-based approach Lu Chen had used to construct this circuit greatly amazed and surprised Li Chen.
"Excellent, excellent!"
"I truly never imagined there could be such an ingenious Firefly Array solution!"
"Your Nightwalker Insects seem to possess a sensing technique that lets them respond to one another, so you linked them with electronic circuits to make a simple Electronic Chip?"
"Exactly," Lu Chen said. "I deeply admired the secret techniques you bestowed upon me, Grand Artisan, but I also felt the urge to emulate them. I boldly went beyond the prescribed material and modified it, implementing it through the insect-control arts I specialize in!"
"A fine modification! Without it, if you had merely presented an ordinary microcontroller or even a logic circuit to fulfill the assignment, I might still have been satisfied, but satisfied would have been all!"
"Now, though, I would like to test you further and see exactly what insights you have into it."
Li Chen considered briefly, then posed several classic algorithm problems.
Bubble sorting, binary tree addressing, testing large-number sets...
This world had no foundations in computing, but computers, too, were Mechanism Devices derived from natural creations. There were still similar mechanisms that bore some resemblance to them.