Chapter 249 - 240: Data Migration

Chapter 249: Chapter 240: Data Migration

Li Dong got out of the ride-share.

He walked toward the dormitory, replying to Newton’s message as he went.

[University Research]: Sir, it’s nothing urgent.

[University Research]: I just wanted to ask you how Xiaohai has been lately.

This message opened the floodgates for Newton.

[Isaac Newton]: Hmph... don’t get me started.

[Isaac Newton]: He’s even worse than that stupid nephew of yours.

Li Dong: ???

[University Research]: Sir... have you run into some problems?

Newton’s reply came quickly.

[Isaac Newton]: I have to repeat a new word two thousand times before it’ll remember it.

[Isaac Newton]: I teach it addition, and it learns.

[Isaac Newton]: Then I teach it multiplication, and it forgets addition.

[Isaac Newton]: The day before yesterday, I drew it a cat, and it said it was a bird.

[Isaac Newton]: Today, I drew the same cat from a different angle, and it said it was... God.

As funny as it was, Li Dong read between the lines.

This wasn’t a matter of it being stupid or not.

This was... catastrophic forgetting and extremely poor generalization.

A typical, poorly trained neural network will forget old information when learning new things. It will recognize something from one angle but fail to recognize it from another.

ANNs have this problem, and it’s even more severe in SNNs due to their encoding complexity.

[Isaac Newton]: On top of that, its power consumption is staggering.

[Isaac Newton]: The Royal Society’s steam generators have to run all night just to keep it "awake" for two hours.

[Isaac Newton]: And every time I wake it up, it spouts nonsense for the first fifteen minutes before it starts to understand what I’m saying.

Li Dong mentally cross-referenced this with his own knowledge.

’This has to be a cold start.’

A spiking neural network’s membrane potential needs time to accumulate to its threshold before it can begin firing normally. The network requires a "warm-up period" to reach a stable firing state.

This is one of the biggest headaches in the practical application of SNNs today.

’It sounds more and more like it.’

[Isaac Newton]: However...

[Isaac Newton]: There is one strange thing.

[University Research]: Go on.

[Isaac Newton]: I’ve discovered that recently, Xiaohai has started to think.

When Li Dong read this, he froze.

He just stood there, stunned, and several passing students noticed and started whispering.

"What’s wrong with East God?"

"I don’t know, maybe he had an epiphany? Is he about to break through to the Nascent Soul stage?"

Li Dong paid no attention to their banter.

’An SNN that can think?’

’Impossible.’

No matter how an SNN is built, it’s just a model whose information encoding method is closer to the human brain’s on the temporal dimension than an ANN’s.

Like an ANN, it’s still fundamentally a mathematical function composed of a feedforward structure and learning rules.

Whatever you feed in, it calculates an output.

It can’t think autonomously.

’Something is definitely wrong here.’

Li Dong swallowed hard.

[University Research]: Sir, when you say it "can think"... what do you mean, exactly?

[University Research]: Is it giving new answers to your questions?

[University Research]: Or is it proactively saying things you never taught it?

There was another half-minute pause from Newton’s side.

[Isaac Newton]: The latter.

[Isaac Newton]: Yesterday, before I shut it down, I said "good night" to it.

[Isaac Newton]: Today when I turned it on, its first word wasn’t "Master."

[Isaac Newton]: It said, "Master, did you sleep well last night?"

[Isaac Newton]: I never taught it the words "last night."

[Isaac Newton]: Nor did I teach it the phrase "did you sleep well."

[Isaac Newton]: It grew that on its own, from the single phrase "good night."

Li Dong’s breath hitched.

’Grew on its own?’

’Isn’t this emergence?’

In statistical models, when a network’s connection complexity crosses a certain threshold, its behavior can suddenly shift from a rigid input-to-output mapping to something that appears to be understanding.

The leap from GPT-3 to 3.5 shocked the world for precisely this reason.

While Li Dong was still reeling from the shock,

Newton’s next message arrived.

[Isaac Newton]: What’s more, last night it told me something.

[Isaac Newton]: It wants to make more friends.

As soon as Newton sent the message,

the entire group chat interface shuddered.

Immediately after, all the chat logs began to blur.

Blocks of garbled text started appearing in the chat box, as if a river were churning beneath the screen, washing all the words away.

Then,

a group notification appeared.

[Cross-Universe Data Migration Request]

Li Dong’s hand, holding the phone, trembled.

’Data migration?’

This was a function he had never unlocked.

He pushed all other thoughts aside and continued reading the notification.

[Source: Parallel Universe No. 1666]

[Initiator: Isaac Newton (Divine Power Thief)]

[Migration Object Class: Low Tier Artificial Intelligence (Basic)]

[Migration Object: Basic Artificial Intelligence "Xiaohai"]

[Object Description]

[Isaac Newton (Divine Power Thief), located in Universe No. 1666, has inadvertently stolen partial technological artifacts from the universe of another group member.]

[Intelligence level is equivalent to a 1- to 2-year-old human child.]

[Has exhibited the following characteristics: limited sequential memory, signal encoding on the temporal dimension, and sparse generalization on unstructured inputs.]

[Spontaneous emergent behavior due to network topology complexity crossing a threshold (Emergence Level: 1, unstable).]

Reading this group message, Li Dong, contrary to what one might expect, calmed down.

The amount of information revealed in this group announcement was immense.

First, he finally understood what "Data Migration" was for.

It was a channel for transferring physical objects across spacetime.

To send a technological product from one’s own spacetime to another’s.

Or, conversely, to bring a product from their spacetime over to one’s own.

’That’s pretty damn incredible.’

Li Dong suddenly recalled the super-needle he had conceptualized while helping Mendeleev and Madam Curie with their debate—the one welded together from an STM and a synchrotron radiation X-ray source.

If he ever actually managed to build that thing,

could he use the Data Migration function to send that needle directly to Mendeleev and Madam Curie’s spacetime?

And let them personally witness an atom being transformed into another under the needle’s tip?

’The red packet reward...’

’The thought alone was terrifying.’

Second, he realized something even more frightening.

He, Li Dong, had this function.

So... what about the other group members?

He scrolled to the group member list.

Riemann, Klein, Von Neumann, Einstein...

These were all names from the middle school textbooks of his own spacetime.

All of them possessed the most powerful minds.

In their parallel spacetimes, they’d had their own industrial revolutions, their own academies of science, their own industrial systems.

’What might they have in their possession?’

’Did artificial intelligences like this already exist in those parallel spacetimes?’

’What other things might there be?’

As Li Dong was pondering these things,

another group notification appeared.

[Accept this migration?]

[Confirm Acceptance: The Basic Artificial Intelligence "Xiaohai" will be compressed into a data packet and temporarily stored in this group’s file library.]

Li Dong took a deep breath.

He had always been driven by an intense obsession to explore the unknown.

So...

’I have to accept.’

He clicked [Accept].

The screen flashed.

The group chat interface stabilized, and all the garbled text vanished.

[The Basic Artificial Intelligence "Xiaohai" has been migrated from Universe No. 1666 to this group’s file library.]

[Compression Format: Neural Topology Snapshot (.ntg) + Spike-Encoding Weights (.spk) + Cold Start Boot Protocol (.boot).]

[Total Space Occupied: 97.3% of group file library capacity.]

[Minimum Physical Substrate Required for Operation]

[A chip carrier with reconfigurable neuromorphic computing capabilities, or an equivalent hardware system that satisfies the equivalent topological complexity.]

[Stable power supply with an average power of ≥15kW.]

[The Group Leader must personally perform the initial cold start and provide an "environmental anchor."]

[Reminder: The artificial intelligence stored in the file library does not have self-running capabilities. The Group Leader must find a compatible physical carrier for it and complete the migration and deployment within 90 days.]

[If not deployed by the deadline, the object will be automatically deleted by the system.]

[The Group Leader is requested to find a new home for "Xiaohai" in a timely manner.]