During his stay in Regenberg, Luo Binhan had read through the major current affairs news of the past two years, as well as the new round of strange tunes on the Chinese Internet. Some of the content made him feel that he was old and might no longer be able to keep up with the current trends soon, but most of them were still within the scope of his understanding. He also paid attention to several emerging technology concept stocks, mainly energy and materials, but also information technology. Several social accounts connected to chatbots are gaining traction online. He had seen one of them posting messages on social networking sites, but he had little interest in it. There is as much intelligence as there are artificial intelligences. This sentence was something he already knew before he was captured by Jing Huang.
A program that could pretend to speak human language, Luo Binhan didn't think it was that mysterious, and he didn't really want to come into contact with such a thing. He didn't understand Malcolm's strong curiosity about this, Liu Ling and Yu Qingshu's vague worries, but then again, he estimated that his sensitivity to technological progress was far worse than ordinary people. . After all, he was used to harassing everyone on the spaceship, and Li Li was still hanging around his bedroom from time to time.
He never imagined that a local researcher could build something similar. There was a huge technical gap. Even though he didn't understand the principle, even an illiterate person could see it. Therefore, when Anthony said that he had also built a chatbot, Luo Binhan didn't know whether he should express his admiration for a moment, or whether this pair of programmers were just small-timers.
"Uh," he said, "pretty awesome?"
"It's just a time-consuming job." Anthony said tiredly, "The model is ready-made, you just need to keep feeding parameters into it... In short, I spent a lot of time to adjust, so that the feedback of this program can match her He looks more and more like me."
"You mean simulating your ex-girlfriend's mind."
"No, not at all. What you said is what those guys use to deceive fools."
On professional issues, Luo Binhan has long been used to being treated as a fool. He asked Anthony to explain what was going on, but preferably without using too many technical terms. His request made the other party almost end the chat. But in the end, the fool wins. The more professional a person is, the more vulnerable they are to the ability to endure fallacies and ignorance.
Anthony leaned back in his chair and ruminated, his eyes dull, and he didn't speak for a long time. Until Luo Binhan thought he was about to give up, he said dryly: "It's like...like gardening."
"Oh. What do you say?"
"You trim the shrubs into the shape you want, like an animal, or a castle or something. You can trim it to look very real... I mean, it doesn't have to be gardening, you can also think of it as a wax figure or pottery, whatever. You are using one thing to imitate another different thing, making them behave similarly under certain circumstances, but their underlying principles are completely different... Can you understand what I mean?"
Anthony grabbed a fistful of his hair in frustration. Luo Binhan also had to admit that this person was probably not a good speaker. But this thought did not show up on his face at all, because experience shows that it will probably make the other person never want to speak again. Instead, he pretended to be interested and encouraged the other person to continue talking.
"What do you mean," he pushed the newly peeled peanuts over, "are you doing the procedure like you are cutting a bush? Are you trying to cut it to look more like your ex-girlfriend?"
"Adjusting parameters is like pruning a shrub." Anthony said, "But the way a plant grows is different from that of a living person. If you don't prune it, the plant will grow according to its own rules. It cannot grow in its natural state. It looks like an animal, because it has a set of independent internal mechanisms, photosynthesis, chloroplasts, cell walls... It uses a different model than animals. I mean, the program is different from the model used by humans. The program Different models may also be used between programs and programs.”
"Like making animal statues out of different materials? Some shrubs, some clay?"
"Yes, that's what it means."
"But they don't have thoughts, and they can't move like living creatures."
"That makes no difference." Anthony said anxiously, "If you make the mechanism sophisticated enough, you can even make the porcelain dolls sing or play the piano... But they don't really understand their own actions like people do - I'm not talking about them. It’s impossible to understand, the point is, they don’t understand in the same way as humans.”
"You make it sound as if the program can indeed think." Luo Binhan asked strangely, "Has our technology advanced to this extent?"
Anthony groaned. "Neural Networks."
"What?"
"I mean artificial neural network - it is one of the computing models we use now. It is copied according to the information transmission method of biological brain nerves. All the nodes, order, weights... this is the model, or the bush itself . And if you want to give it a personality, you only need to trim its appearance, adjust its parameters and environment, without touching its basic model. In fact, you can't intervene because the entire mechanism is too complicated. Well, that’s an algorithmic version of brain surgery. We can’t do as much as doctors. At least they have a correct prototype sample for reference. But no matter what, if you ask me about the artificial intelligence developed by the neural network model Can they think? At least I think they can, but the thinking path is different from ours. You should know that now they say that plants and fish can think, so there is no reason to exclude the algorithmic way of thinking."
"Just say it is." Luo Binhan said absently. He wasn't sure he fully understood what Anthony meant, but the technical talk of poltergeists had sunk into his ears. "But... how do we convert human brain nerves into algorithms? It can't be done by asking a living person to dissect it, right?"
"I don't know exactly what equipment they used, but they managed to copy the responses of neurons when people make decisions. It has nothing to do with the actual transmitters, you just need to know the active parts of the system. Just how to correlate and assign weights. But I have also heard of neural network models that may involve anatomy... I can’t remember clearly, but there is a neural network model that uses cat’s cranial nerves to simulate it.”
"Oh?" Luo Binhan said. Unconsciously, he had forgotten the beginning of the topic, straightened up and stared at the opposite side attentively.
"What's wrong?" Anthony asked sensitively, "What word did I use wrong?"
"I won't know if you used it wrong." Luo Binhan said, "I don't understand your technical matters. But you might as well talk about the cat model. Does it think about things like a cat?"
He thought he didn't reveal anything wrong, but Anthony still stole a few suspicious glances. "I haven't studied that model carefully," he said, "but I heard that a team used it for decision-making training. They played a mouse-catching game - you get points for every mouse you catch, and you The time spent will cause points to be deducted, hitting the wall will also deduct points, and hitting the doghouse will directly end the game. In this way, if the algorithm wants to get the highest score, it must study the best course of action. They want to use this training to make the algorithm smarter."
"Then what?"
"This algorithm has learned to commit suicide every time it starts." Anthony said, "Go straight to the doghouse. In this way, at least it will not lose the time consumption and points deducted for hitting the wall. This is from its neural network The best solution we could think of.”
"A pure and innocent life." Luo Binhan said. There was no emotion behind his words, it was just a casual remark. Anthony suddenly looked at him thoughtfully.
"You didn't also use this algorithm model to stuff your girlfriend's data, right?" Luo Binhan asked, "And then it started to persuade you to jump off the building?"
"I didn't use this model. But..."
"Did I really advise you to jump off a building?"
"It sent me a message that it shouldn't have."
Luo Binhan looked at him confused. Anthony thought about it for a long time, and finally collapsed again. "I've been training her tone of voice. I've made her language habits when answering questions more like hers, and then the way she answers questions."
“How can you make a program think more like a person?”
"This is still a matter of pruning. You just need to have enough training sets to allow it to form internal paths by itself." Anthony said impatiently, "It's essentially a manual job, so I don't actually expect that I can make one." What's coming... I'm just passing the time and looking for ideas——"
"Look for your ex-girlfriend's thoughts on breaking up with you." Luo Binhan added somewhat evilly.
Anthony pretended not to hear him. His face had already started to turn red due to alcohol, so Luo Binhan couldn't tell what was going on. He said vigorously: "Two weeks ago, I made an interface between it and my other programs, so that it can do more complex calculations and associations, but the data set is still closed - I don't want it to go online. To catch the message, let it use the learning materials I provided - and then I gave it a few simple spelling puzzles, just to let it try to make a sentence out of the limited alphabet. I, we used to do this game……"
"Is this what you guys do as a couple?" Luo Binhan asked in shock.
"What's wrong with this?"
Luo Binhan is hard to say. He secretly updated some stereotypes about foreigners in his heart. Of course this makes no sense, but before, he had always felt that foreigners would be as bored with the people they talked to as Malcolm. He felt that he should not continue to make a fuss, which would inevitably make him look inexperienced. This is very inconsistent with his current personality.
"How's the performance of your program?" he asked. "Can it find all the sentences? I guess it can do this easier than a human?"
"Why do you think so?"
"Shouldn't this be common sense?"
Anthony seemed about to say something, but gave up. He decisively declared that the issue was irrelevant, but that he was not that "smart" in doing the procedure himself. It has insufficient computing resources and a limited vocabulary. The former was due to financial constraints, while the latter was intentional on his part. He didn't want the program to spell words it shouldn't have because it had an unfiltered Internet corpus. It also shouldn't be able to spell sentences it shouldn't, because its training model is simply not mature enough to understand grammar.
One day just a week ago, when Anthony Kent walked back to his guest room from the restaurant, he found that a window with a smiley face had popped up on the screen.
This window was set by himself to notify the completion progress of the training set. When the program thinks it has found all the hidden sentences in the alphabet, it sends him a smiley face, followed by a document attachment with all the answers, the total time spent and the resulting score. Due to the influence of the time coefficient, the overall score is often negative. He is accustomed to this and is not prepared to adjust the calculation rules. He just thought it would finish its mission earlier than usual today. And then he saw the score. 9 points.
He looked carefully again. It was indeed a positive 9 points, a high score he had never encountered in training. This doesn't make sense, it's probably something wrong. So he opened the attachment that recorded all the statements, and found only a single line where at least six answers should have been recorded:
There is a time for everything. There is a time to be born and a time to die.
At first, Anthony stared at this line of words in confusion, thinking that there was something wrong with the condition parameters he set himself. The game is supposed to end when at least six sentences are spelled out and no new results can be found, but now there is only one sentence here, and this sentence is not even among the standard answers he prepared. He read the sentence again and recognized that it was undoubtedly a quotation from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, the period poem said to have been written by King Solomon. At that moment, a piercing electric current suddenly passed through his back, and he realized that this sentence would never appear in the language library he had set up in advance. To the program in this computer, it spelled out a philosophical statement that had never existed in the world.
"Are you so sure?" Luo Binhan asked when he heard this. "The words themselves are not particularly popular. Maybe they are just randomly combined?"
"No, that's not the case... I haven't had time to teach it grammar yet. If it doesn't follow the existing database, its chance of getting a long sentence right is less than 20%."
"What about your database? Are you sure you didn't accidentally put this sentence in it?"
"This is impossible."
"Why? Don't you ever misplace things?"
Anthony looked at him sadly for a moment. "Because this sentence comes from the Bible, I have long banned all sentences from the Bible."
"What's this for? Piety?"
"No, it has nothing to do with that."
He didn't explain any more. Luo Binhan saw that this was a rather personal secret, and it might not be important in explaining the strange things Anthony was currently encountering. He stopped pursuing it and instead wondered how a forbidden word had slipped into private proceedings. "Are you sleepwalking?" he asked aimlessly. "Maybe you have a dual personality? Who entered your room by chance? Your pet stepped on the keyboard?"
"I'm staying in a hotel," Anthony said. He didn't even bother to answer the first two hypotheses, but talked about how he checked the database and running logs and concluded that this could not be done spontaneously by the program. Someone had changed the parameters he set, or even fed another training set too much. This problem alone was enough to drive people crazy, and it didn't explain why the end conditions he set for the training game didn't work. He checked it all, and at least from the moment he returned to the room, all the conditions were set exactly as he had done. Maybe someone had changed it and then restored it - which meant his computer had been compromised. He went to ask the hotel service staff, and even asked to call the surveillance system, which made him very unhappy. But no one had ever been to his room, so it could only be a non-physical invasion.
Anthony Kent couldn't understand how this happened, as if a prank-loving elf had sneaked into his room and left such an unexpected message in his program. He couldn't find any traces of intrusion and could only wonder if someone had tampered with the hardware. Regardless, it is no longer safe to continue using this computer for personal projects. He completely transferred and cleared the sensitive data inside, almost to the point of physically destroying it. But there was some reluctance that stopped him from going to the hardware store to buy a hammer - he still couldn't figure out who could tamper with his computer. A mysterious man defeated him, but at least he had to find a way. So he took his computer to a repair shop, not just any roadside repair shop, but a friend abroad who specialized in this. Now the new computer is still being debugged, but he himself is upset and his life is completely disrupted.
What a mess. When he said this, he admitted to Luo Binhan. There was an obvious drunken look on his face, and his speech gradually became incoherent. "I would rather believe in ghosts." He threw the plastic ball made from a toast bag into the wine glass in confusion. "It would be a good thing if it was done by ghosts!" He began to speak in English, but Luo Binhan couldn't understand a few words. slang and then abbreviations. Before this man completely fell into a state of alcoholic madness, Luo Binhan quickly grabbed his wine glass and went to the counter to pour him a glass of warm water.
"You drank too much." He half-persuaded and half-forced him to give the other party a few sips of water. Anthony's expression looked like he might vomit at any moment. "How did you survive this amount of alcohol?"
"I slept a total of ten hours this week." Anthony said vaguely, lying weakly on the table. Luo Binhan was really shocked. He didn't feel much about the electronic ghost story this man told, because in his opinion, Anthony Kent was just an ordinary programmer, and he was not old for this industry. This person's professional level has to be questioned. Maybe it was just a more powerful hacker who targeted him and made a not-so-kind joke on him, but he made a fuss and concluded that this was absolutely impossible. But this man's haggardness opened his eyes, as if a program anomaly caused the whole world to collapse - maybe he was just too sad, Luo Binhan said to himself in his heart, maybe this man made himself so embarrassed because of something. About the ex-girlfriend.
This thought made him suddenly feel a little more sympathetic to Anthony Kent. He was thinking of Zhou Yu a few years ago. During that time, they were like a siege, and they didn't want to let go of any clue that seemed extremely absurd. On a dead midnight, Zhou Yu fell asleep in the living room. He walked into the study with nothing to do, and casually opened the anthology of Sapphic poems left by Zhou Yu in the deepest part of the bookcase, but found it among the pages. Two or three densely packed notes. There were various weird contents written on it in Zhou Yu's handwriting, such as human bones or nettles. At first, he thought these were some unpopular prescriptions. It wasn't until the word "ghost" appeared that he realized Where things are heading. He immediately clamped the pieces of paper back into place, pretending that he had found nothing, but he knew in his heart that they could not continue like this. Perhaps it was that night that he had accepted the reality of Zhou Yu's disappearance, and was preparing to let Zhou Yu accept it one day.
He really should have taken action right then and there, but it was just too hard to say. That is to nail the coffin boards of a missing person. So he said nothing until Zhou Yu went to the hospital for cutting his wrists in the bathroom. He was convinced that Zhou Yu did not commit suicide. It was not a sign of excellent professionalism for a medical student to commit suicide by cutting his wrists. Luo Binhan didn't want to think about this matter further. He sighed and asked himself: Did Zhou Yu at that time look more normal than the Anthony in front of him? He suddenly felt that a heavy responsibility fell on his shoulders, and he could not leave such an unaccompanied drunkard from a foreign country and leave.
"Where is the hotel you are staying in?" He knocked on Anthony's drooping head, "Should I take you back?"
Anthony made a few sounds vaguely and couldn't understand them at all. Luo Binhan couldn't help but regret, suspecting that his appearance made this guy who lacked someone to talk to suddenly take advantage of him. If he hadn't asked anything, he might have gone to bed at home by now instead of rummaging under the counter for some sober medicine or a clean towel. He was still fumbling around among the bags of coffee beans marked with different origins and roasting degrees. Anthony staggered over and vomited on the ground. A pungent smell filled the room.
"Are you kidding me?" Luo Binhan said angrily. He had to get up from the counter and walk over to give the other person some air so that no one would choke to death on the vomit first. "You'd better go and lie down in bed. Where is your hotel?"
Anthony was speechless for a moment, probably still tortured by the smell of vomit, and just pointed to his pocket. Luo Binhan put his hand in and touched an access card. At this time, there was movement at the door of the store, and two noisy voices suddenly appeared.
"Shut up!" one person yelled, "If you make any more noise, I'll put you in a pot!"
Not to be outdone, the person who was threatened shouted back: "MAYDAY! MAYDAY!"
Luo Binhan couldn't help but turn his head to look. When he heard the latter voice, he was so surprised that he almost forgot about Anthony, and when the person coming towards him saw him, the bored expression on his face suddenly froze. The birdcage he was holding was not covered with gauze, and a gorgeous budgerigar squatted inside, looking around with a haughty face. When it saw Luo Binhan, it flapped its wings impatiently.
"Captain!" it shouted happily, falling down and pecking at the cage door, "Captain! Captain!"
Luo Binhan took his hand out of Anthony's pocket calmly. He looked at the young man with dyed gray hair and a birdcage in his hand, and at the parrot who was very happy to see an acquaintance, and he became completely confused about the situation he was in.
(End of chapter)
