Reality Programming Association

Chapter 38: Chapter 16: Autumn Date

Yu Xian’s heart skipped a beat.

He wondered, ”Cutting-edge? My parents wrote their paper in 2016. Is it still considered cutting-edge today? Besides, the earliest large language model, GPT-1, wasn’t developed until 2018. How could this technology have been applied to large language models back in 2016?”

”Then...” Yu Xian stared into Wen Xiao’s eyes, tentatively posing the core question. ”Is it possible that this technology could be used on people, rather than just large language models? For example, could a person’s consciousness or personality undergo vectorization, allowing it to be calculated or modified like an AI?”

Silence hung in the air for a few seconds. Only the whir of the coffee grinder could be heard in the shop.

Wen Xiao stared at him blankly, blinking her round eyes. Then, with a sudden PFFT, she burst into laughter, her professional, academic demeanor instantly vanishing.

”Yu Xian, have you been watching too much anime?” she asked, picking up her latte. She took a sip, leaving a dab of milk foam on the corner of her mouth. ”How could that be possible? We always compare the brain to a computer, but that’s just a metaphor. Do you know how complex the human brain is? There are hundreds of billions of neurons and real-time, dynamically changing bio-electrochemical reactions. If you were to apply vectorization to all of that, even the most powerful computer today wouldn’t be able to store a single person’s complete data.”

Seeing that Yu Xian wasn’t smiling, Wen Xiao dropped her amusement and continued to explain, ”In a computer, text can be converted into vectors because text is inherently made of discrete, finite symbols. But humans are continuous. We’re chaotic. If you try to force vectorization onto a person, you’d end up discarding 99.99% of their information and retaining only a few lifeless labels.”

She tilted her head thoughtfully. ”In that case, we’d become just like NPCs in a video game.”

”Unable to store it all... becoming NPCs in a game...” Yu Xian mused. He wondered, ”If Wen Xiao is right, and this is the academic consensus a decade after 2016, is the direction of my parents’ research flawed?”

Yu Xian fell into deep thought. If even a professional AI researcher like Wen Xiao considered this an absolute fantasy in theory, there were only two possibilities.

Either his parents’ research was nothing but a misguided pipe dream.

Or, they had touched upon a ”forbidden zone” that the modern scientific community had yet to even approach.

Across the table, Wen Xiao seemed somewhat restless. She glanced out the window at the heavy rain, then down at herself, as if she had something she wanted to say.

”What’s wrong?” Yu Xian asked, snapping out of his daze. ”Did you think my question was too absurd?”

”Ah, no, no,” Wen Xiao said, abruptly sitting up straight like an elementary schooler who had just been called on by a teacher. ”Oh, right! Um, Shao Yiyi asked me to ask you a question. What is your exact birth time—the specific hour and minute? Did you give her the wrong time before?”

Yu Xian blinked in surprise. Why had the topic suddenly jumped to his birthday? It was incredibly abrupt.

”Is she casting trigrams again? You study artificial intelligence; why are you following her down the rabbit hole of metaphysics?”

”From a professional perspective... it’s not entirely metaphysics,” she replied.

”A professional perspective?” Yu Xian raised an eyebrow. ”Is fortune-telling a computer science elective now?”

”Don’t laugh, I’m serious. After listening to what Shao Yiyi had to say, I realized that much of the underlying logic in the Book of Changes is actually fundamentally linked to computer science,” Wen Xiao said. She extended a finger, tracing imaginary lines on the sleek tabletop. ”For example, the trigrams of the Eight Diagram are completely interconnected with binary arithmetic. Or, to put it another way, the binary system was actually inspired and perfected based on the Eight Diagram.”

Yu Xian suspected he had misheard.

Binary and the Eight Diagram?

These two things were poles apart. One was the foundation of computer science, while the other was the progenitor of metaphysics. How could there possibly be a connection between them?

”Huh?”