Campus Belle
After his surprise faded, Wu Chen remembered who the girl was.
Min Xinrou.
Although he had never taught her in his previous life, he had seen her a few times and heard some gossip about her.
He did not remember the rest very clearly.
But her looks had left a deep impression on him.
Unlike the beauties on Douyin in later years, whose faces had been transformed by filters, Min Xinrou's beauty was the real deal. Even compared with Yang Mi at her peak, she did not fall short.
She had an oval face, delicate brows and eyes as lovely as a painting, and slightly upturned outer corners to her eyes without a trace of flirtatiousness. Her skin was naturally cool and pale, her nose bridge high and delicately shaped, and her lips cleanly defined.
Even standing there with no adornment, she looked like a clear, pristine ink-wash painting.
Teachers were no less interested in gossip than students, and they really did vote on things like department belles and campus belles.
For a time, Jiang Nan had been the campus belle among the faculty and staff, while Min Xinrou had been the undergraduates' campus belle. Both had been famous.
That was why, even after a whole lifetime, Wu Chen recognized her the moment he saw her.
Of course, he was only admiring her beauty.
"You're here early?"
He wasn't really an inexperienced youngster, after all, so Wu Chen quickly concealed how struck he was by her beauty and greeted her naturally.
Min Xinrou seemed not to have expected Wu Chen to speak to her first. Teachers generally did not take the initiative to talk to students.
She straightened up and answered somewhat nervously, "Hello, sir. I work at the cafeteria, and I came straight here after my shift."
She was from Chaoshan. The ends of her sentences were soft, and she spoke rather slowly, pronouncing each word lightly, with a somewhat cautious reserve. Her accent was not forced; instead, it made her sound especially sincere.
Wu Chen nodded. "Have a seat. It's best to get some rest at midday. There's a lot of theory in this afternoon's classes."
Min Xinrou obediently acknowledged him and sat in the front row, directly facing Wu Chen.
But instead of putting her head down on the desk to sleep, she took out her computer and began fiddling with it.
Wu Chen glanced at her computer and saw that it was a white Lenovo ThinkPad X61, a thin, lightweight laptop well suited to a female college student.
For software development, though, it was a little underpowered.
More importantly, half the keyboard had been soaked in a dark brown liquid.
Not only did it look filthy, but it had also stopped working, so Min Xinrou used a small external keyboard in its place.
She was clearly a clean, pretty girl, but the contrast between her and her computer was far too great.
Noticing Wu Chen's gaze, Min Xinrou shrank back, seemingly a little embarrassed.
But Wu Chen asked no further questions. He looked away and returned to reviewing his teaching materials for the afternoon.
The two quietly went about their own business until the bell rang at 1:30, when the last student hurried into the classroom.
Wu Chen shut the classroom door, walked to the lectern, and formally began class.
"All of you are software engineering students, and you may think your major has little to do with artificial intelligence."
"But what I want to tell you is that the future will definitely be the age of artificial intelligence, and it will arrive in no more than ten years."
"Right now, we're standing on the crest of that age's wave."
"One day in the near future, when countless people, including you future programmers, are worrying about whether artificial intelligence will replace them at work..."
"You'll be grateful to the university for letting you step into the future ahead of time in your third year, the most important year of college, and giving you the confidence that you won't be left behind."
"Of course, before we head into the future, let's take attendance."
A chorus of sharp intakes of breath immediately arose in the classroom.
Wu Chen calmly took out the attendance register.
"Min Xinrou."
"Here."
Min Xinrou's student number was lower than everyone else's, beginning with 2005, so her name came first.
That was because she had repeated her second year, though Wu Chen did not remember why.
Of course, he did not care either.
Next came the regular students in the current cohort, whose student numbers began with 2006.
"Sun Jiayi."
"Here!"
"Ni Lei."
"Ni Lei?"
"He's not here, is he? I'll mark him late once. His roommates should let him know that if he skips class more than three times in a semester, he'll automatically fail the course."
"Yang Yuanjing!"
"Here~"
After taking attendance, Wu Chen did not ask the students to hand in their phones at the front. He went straight into the lesson.
University rules in 2008 were not that strict. That applied not just to classes and the open campus, but also to things like staying out overnight. Nobody cared at all.
Parent group chats were even further out of the question.
When he thought about college students in 2025, they really had it rough.
This class covered the basic theory of artificial intelligence.
Since it was the first class, Wu Chen certainly wouldn't teach overly advanced algorithms. He started with the principles instead.
"The simplest goal of artificial intelligence is to create machines that can think like humans."
"Humans improve by learning knowledge, and naturally, machines do the same."
"That's what we mean by the term machine learning."
"But machines can't directly understand the things human eyes see."
"A machine needs to convert what it 'sees' into a language it can recognize: electrical signals."
"In a higher-level representation, those become zeros and ones. As this slide shows, the digits zero and seven have both been converted into zeros and ones, forming bitmaps."
"This way, a machine can recognize images."
"But a new problem soon arises. With just a little interference, a small change to the original image, this logic stops working."
"If we put a pen beside it, the machine can no longer recognize the digit seven."
"So why is that?"
"Because humans can think abstractly, but machines cannot."
"And the reason humans can think is that we have a complex nervous system, which gives us infinite possibilities."
"So, is it possible to have machines simulate the human nervous system?"
"Naturally, it is."
"That's because human neurons have an important property: all or none."
"That is, in a simplified model, when the sum of the input signals exceeds a certain threshold, this artificial neuron is activated..."
"So what we need to do is..."
Although they were third-year students, they were all encountering artificial intelligence for the first time, so Wu Chen explained it in great detail.
In his view, it was very important for them to understand the development of artificial intelligence.
Only then could they demystify artificial intelligence in the future and go on to research better, newer technologies, rather than regard ChatGPT as a god.
Before they knew it, it was 4:35 p.m., and all four class periods were over.
As soon as the bell rang, Wu Chen stopped explaining.
"Class dismissed."
He was a teacher who never kept a class past the bell.
And the students responded quickly.
After a clatter of chairs, the classroom soon had only a few people left.
Only Min Xinrou was still sitting in her seat, thinking as she looked at her computer.
After packing his bag, Wu Chen walked down from the lectern and unconsciously glanced at her screen.
She was looking over the class notes she had just taken.
Wu Chen had always appreciated students who were willing to learn, and he was very patient with them.
He had also noticed that Min Xinrou had been sneaking glances at him the whole time. She obviously had a question but was too embarrassed to ask.
So he took the initiative. "Do you have a question?"
"Um, yes, but do you have time, Mr. Wu?"
"Go ahead."
"Okay..."
Min Xinrou hesitated for a moment before speaking again in a soft voice.
"Sir, do you think it's possible to use artificial intelligence technology to bring a person back to life inside a computer?"