On Friday, schools let out earlier. By the ti Zhao Yi parked his bicycle, dusk had already fallen.
Zhao Yi stopped, locking up his bike.
A man with a small beard quickly approached him, saying, "Are you Zhao Yi, the genius hacker? Can I get a quick interview?"
"Go ahead."
After a few days, he had gotten used to it.
So reporters were always waiting downstairs. They were different every day, probably because he was not noteworthy enough to be monitored closely. They usually asked a few questions and left, with only a few wanting to follow him inside to take an interview, which he flatly refused.
An elder in a Zhongshan suit standing at the gate of the building called out, "Little Yi, do you need help?"
The man with the small beard shuddered.
"Thank you, uncle, no need,"
Zhao Yi replied.
Since he beca a celebrity online, many reporters had been coming for interviews, causing the neighbors around him to regard him as an important star in their neighborhood.
Uncle Li, who was responsible for sanitary managent, found new purpose.
Uncle Li voluntarily helped ’shoo away’ the reporters, always squatting at the entrance of the building. He asked any strangers what they were doing there and resolutely refused to let any reporters in.
By the way.
Only by the way.
When he t familiar faces from the neighborhood, especially the ladies, he would brag a little, "Little Yi grew up right under my eyes. I held him when he was less than two years old. He even peed on once!"
"This child, I could tell he was destined for greatness. I was the one who stated back then that his future is limitless!"
"What do you think?"
"Isn’t my foresight impressive?"
After exchanging a few words with Uncle Li, Zhao Yi looked around as he headed to the building gate and found that the small bearded man was the only one there.
He heaved a sigh of relief.
It seed that the dia frenzy was dying down, and the reporters coming for interviews were significantly fewer.
The small bearded man chased after Zhao Yi, "I am a reporter from the ’Zhengyang Morning News.’ On the ’Brain Power Burst’ program, Dr. Li Lin challenged you, saying that even if you restored the Rubik’s cube in a fixed number of steps, it doesn’t necessarily an you did it in the fewest steps possible. What is your take on this?"
Upon hearing this, Zhao Yi frowned and replied, "I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just got out of school and haven’t caught up with the news yet."
"Sorry."
With that, he walked into the building entrance.
The small-bearded man was about to follow him but was stopped by Uncle Li, "What are you doing! Reporters can’t go inside!"
"Stop!"
"Reporters shouldn’t invade people’s lives like this!"
Zhao Yi went upstairs.
His attitude wasn’t too good, mainly because of this reporter’s aggressive line of questioning.
So reporters were just like that.
They asked provocative questions that could easily portray Li Lin as Zhao Yi’s opponent or enemy. But in reality, he didn’t even know who Li Lin was.
How should he respond to this?
If he asked, ’Who is Li Lin?’ the headline might read ’Genius Hacker Disparages Li Lin.’
Staying silent is the best strategy.
After getting ho and chatting with his mom for a bit, he retreated to his room, turned on his computer, and checked the latest developnts online.
The announcents of ’Brain Power Burst.’
The contestants and celebrities of ’Brain Power Burst’ voicing their support for the show.
What Dr. Li Lin said in an interview, "The fact that he can restore the Rubik’s cube does not an it is done in the fewest steps. It is possible there are faster thods to restore the Rubik’s cube faster."
"Up to now, there is no efficient calculation thod to determine the minimal steps for restoring a Rubik’s cube."
"This is a challenge faced by the entire world."
Indeed.
As the small bearded man said, Li Lin doubted the so-called ’fewest steps.’
Li Lin may not have been targeting him, and his statents were true, but Zhao Yi found it quite irritating.
No efficient calculation thod?
A worldwide challenge?
Damn it, I’ll solve it now!
...
Zhao Yi, resolute to solve the challenge, indulgently used up another Research Coin. After two long hours, he finally created a program that could sort and filter the cube’s states.
This was the core of the algorithm.
This tool could determine if twisting the cube would make it more scrambled, and thereby eliminate a significant portion of the calculations. This was precisely what he was aiming to accomplish in perfecting the algorithm.
The next step was to twist the cube.
The three-dinsional Rubik’s cube had three possible twisting directions. Each direction had 9 possible twists, totalling 27 possibilities (a 180-degree twist is also counted as one step).
The first-step screening program had to assess these 27 possibilities.
For the second step, he had a simple elimination of duplicates; in other words, the state of the cube after the second twist could not be the sa as its state after the first twist or before any twists. This requirent imdiately eliminated five possibilities.
Now, each judgent only required 22 chances.
And then he just had to keep on going.
This was the most basic thod of complete coverage calculation, entirely relying on computer performance to calculate the cube’s restoration process.
Of course.
The computation required would surely be imnse. Even a slightly scrambled Rubik’s cube would overwhelm the capabilities of a standard ho computer.
That’s where the filtering algorithm ca into play.
With each step, the algorithm would filter out nurous computational branches. The closer the cube got to being solved, the more disruptive the rotations beca, reducing the base number that needed to be multiplied each ti, until there was only one way to restore the cube in the final step.
This significantly reduced computational requirents.
But this was still not enough.
If the cube is in a state of great complexity, requiring more than 18 steps to solve, the computational requirents would still be astronomical.
Zhao Yi implented a ’selective elimination comparison thod’.
For each turn of the cube, steps that would add confusion were filtered out. Every small step within each branch was filtered exactly 22 tis, following the principle that the closer the cube got to being solved, the more complex the rotations beca. The branches with fewer filtered elents could be paused imdiately through comparison within each generation.
Once again, this greatly reduced the computational load.
After a rough estimate by Zhao Yi, a cube that required fifteen steps to be solved had a maximum possible number of filter operations of thirty million tis at most.
However.
The specifics could only be determined by running the program.
Zhao Yi casually ate so food and worked overti for two hours, finishing the coding only after midnight.
Even though he used a Study Coin to replenish his energy, his eyeballs were still bloodshot.
Forget it!
He would debug it tomorrow!
Just as he was about to shut down his computer, he noticed a new ssage on QQ, identified by the headshot of an elder.
He opened it to find it was from Professor Liu, of the "Computer Technology Exchange Group".
"Professor Liu?"
Zhao Yi was surprised.
The ssage from Professor Liu was direct, "Zhao Yi, I have these algorithm packages here that can be debugged and run, but the algorithms inside are too complex and the computational requirents are huge. Could you find the ti to help simplify the algorithms?"
"What kind of algorithms?" Zhao Yi responded imdiately.
Professor Liu replied, "Mainly data analysis. Based on what’s in our system database, it’s about finding the optimal solution to the input query."
Zhao Yi stared at the screen expressionlessly for a while.
He knew what each word, each phrase ant, but why couldn’t he understand them when they were put together? Weren’t we all speaking Chinese?
After a long pause, he tentatively typed back, "Artificial intelligence?"
"Right."
"Phew~~~"
Zhao Yi discovered his potential for guesswork, having managed to understand the ssage through guesses.
Professor Liu began to explain.
He had been dedicated to researching artificial neural networks, conquering many difficulties and challenges. Recently, he had been working on the transformation between Chinese and computer languages, hoping to find a way for computers to understand Chinese, beyond simple translation.
For instance.
When asked the question, "What is your na?", a computer could easily scan for the keyword ’na’ and make a corresponding reply.
But if the question was "Does your na include the character ’Wang’?"
The computer would still scan for the keyword ’na’ and respond as if asked the previous question, instead of answering ’yes’ or ’no’.
Zhao Yi understood now.
After discussing with Professor Liu, he found the topic very interesting.
This was the charm of computer-related work.
Whether it was computer programs, automation, or artificial intelligence, they all resulted in tangible, usable outcos. Achievents could result in direct changes to people’s lives, unlike so theoretical disciplines.
Take physics, for example.
Even if a physicist achieved sothing substantial and won a Nobel Prize for it, his research might not be applied until a hundred years later and only a few people could truly understand it.
Most people would just be like, "Wow... Incredible!"
What its practical use was, no one could say.
The results for biology and chemistry were similar. Researching a gorilla’s IQ obviously didn’t relate to most people’s lives, and chemical advancents rarely made it into the public sphere. Most academic research was irrelevant to the average person’s life.
Results in computer science could be seen directly and were often quickly incorporated into people’s lives.
Zhao Yi found the concept of computers understanding Chinese very interesting.
Even in a decade or so, in an era when artificial intelligence was acknowledged as a direction for technological advancent, there weren’t many intelligences that could understand the question ’Does your na include the character ’Wang’?’ Being able to participate in a project dealing with this problem would indeed be very interesting.
Professor Liu recomnded two books to Zhao Yi.
One was his own published work on artificial neural networks, and the other was an English book on evolutionary algorithms and genetic algorithms.
"My research has no ti limit." Professor Liu said, "You can take a look at it whenever you have ti."
Zhao Yi responded with a ’sure’.
He suddenly thought of his paper and imdiately asked, "Professor Liu, I am planning to write an academic paper, but I’m just a high school student with no experience in this. Could I ask you so questions if I encounter any problems?"
"No problem, just leave a ssage."
Professor Liu readily agreed, then asked curiously," Since you are just a high school student, why are you writing a paper? Is it to get into a good university?"
"Huh?"
Zhao Yi was a bit stunned. What did that an?
After what looked like consideration, Professor Liu replied, "That’s easy to solve. As long as you can help simplify one of the algorithms, I will call the Admissions Office of the University of Science and Technology and have them admit you without needing an exam."
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