Chapter 35 - 15: Profound Tofu-Stuffed Dumplings

Chapter 35: Chapter 15: Profound Tofu-Stuffed Dumplings

So, within this theory, an equation like this should exist:

Pork dumpling - pork + chives = chive dumpling.

A pork dumpling vector, minus the pork trait, plus the chive trait, equals a chive dumpling.

It sounded magical, but in vector space, this was a perfectly valid mathematical operation.

And his parents’ paper actually intended to apply this method to human beings?

Yu Xian felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

They planned to map something as mysterious and intangible as "personality" into a high-dimensional mathematical space, turning it into sets of coordinates? A sense of absurdity washed over him.

If personalities could be computed through vectorization, did that mean the old saying "a leopard never changes its spots" would no longer apply? As long as one found the corresponding eigenvector and performed a simple Subtraction or addition on a mathematical level, a person could instantly turn into someone else.

Yu Xian’s mind buzzed. All the bizarre events he had encountered recently felt like scattered pearls suddenly strung together.

For example...

If the vectorized "Shi Zuozhou" underwent a Subtraction of his "loves cilantro" trait, what would he become?

If the vectorized Professor "Gao Jiguo" underwent a Subtraction of his "survival instinct" and an addition of "extreme guilt," what would he equal?

If a vectorized "suicide victim" had some other unknown factor added, would it make people think he had been replaced by a doppelgänger?

Then... wasn’t the vectorized Xia Li simply "zeroed out"?

"A zero vector multiplied by any vector equals zero." He recalled a theorem he had learned in his linear algebra class. Could it be that Xia Li’s "vector" was multiplied by a "zero vector," causing her disappearance? Was the final result that she had become an empty set, both on a physical level and in everyone’s memories?

In a daze, a massive, absurd wave of dizziness gave him a headache.

If this world truly operated on some kind of mathematical logic, then this sort of "zeroing out" was indeed far more absolute than death. It was like a vector line segment with a directional arrow. "Death" meant walking from the beginning to the end in the direction of the arrow and stopping—but the line segment still remained. "Zeroing out," on the other hand, meant compressing this line segment directly back to its starting point, back to the origin of the coordinate axis.

He shook his head vigorously, forcing himself to break free from this terrifying conjecture.

He told himself, "You’re overthinking it, Yu Xian. You’re overthinking it." This was the only comfort he could find.

After all, this was just a ten-year-old paper, merely a theoretical hypothesis his parents had proposed back then. People in reality were flesh-and-blood carbon-based organisms; how could they possibly be "computed" like vector coordinates? It defied the fundamental laws of physics and contradicted basic biological common sense.

Despite experiencing Xia Li’s disappearance and the change in Shi Zuozhou’s habits, Yu Xian still believed in the objective reality of the world. Or rather, at the very least, Xia Li’s disappearance required a feasible path of execution and credible logic. He refused to believe that someone could suddenly be vectorized out of thin air, without any logic, like a deus ex machina. They might as well tell him directly that Xia Li had ascended and become an immortal. Perhaps this was just the stubbornness of a science student.

Besides, even if her vector had returned to zero, why did he still remember her? That didn’t make sense either.

But aside from that, the paper’s theoretical framework and forward-looking perspective still left him deeply astounded. It offered a completely new yet self-consistent way of understanding personality.

Perhaps he needed to consult an expert in this field... A cartoonish bun hairstyle popped into his head. Wen Xiao. Although she gave Yu Xian the impression of "not looking too bright," she was still a student at JCU’s School of Artificial Intelligence. She should be a professional when it came to knowledge related to vectorization. The next time they met, he could subtly ask for her guidance. He could check if there were any similar studies or related cases in academia. Who knows, he might be able to dig up some clues about his parents’ research and their accident from those cases and research teams.

After calming himself down, Yu Xian refocused his attention on the third keyword in the paper’s title: High-Dimensional Topological Manifold.

This was likely his mother’s field of research. If he couldn’t grasp this, he wouldn’t be able to understand the core of this paper—how the mapping and storage mechanism of a vectorized personality was achieved. After studying it for a long while, Yu Xian formed his own understanding of the concept. It contained two elements: "topology" and "manifold."

First was "topology." In the field of mathematics, topology was colloquially known as "rubber-sheet geometry." It treated all objects in the world as lumps of modeling clay.

Take the dumpling on the plate, for example. From the outside, it was a solid ball of dough wrapped around a filling; it had no "holes." This concept of a "hole" was relative to things like a donut, a mug with a handle, or a bracelet, which did have "holes." Therefore, a steamed bun, an apple, or even a solid ball—all of which lacked "holes"—were exactly the same thing in the eyes of a topologist. This was because one could freely knead this "clay," reshaping a dumpling into a steamed bun without tearing it or fusing it together.

But if it was a donut, as mentioned earlier, it had a hole in the middle. You could never mold a steamed bun into a donut—unless you poked a hole through its center. Conversely, you could knead a mug with a handle into a donut like modeling clay because both the mug and the donut shared a single "hole."

This was the world through his mother’s eyes: everything was "clay," and only the number of "holes" remained eternally constant.

Having understood "topology," the next step was "manifold." The term sounded mystical, but it was actually very easy to understand. For instance, when standing on the ground, one would feel the surface was flat, yet everyone knew the Earth was a sphere. Much like the surface of the Earth, it appeared flat on a local scale, but when viewed as a whole, it was curved. A space that was locally flat but globally curved, like the Earth, was a manifold.

So, what did the "dimension" of a manifold refer to? Take the wrapper of this dumpling... Never mind, take this piece of discarded A4 scratch paper on the desk as an example.

The paper was covered in writing and stored information; it was a two-dimensional plane. If it were rolled into a cylinder, it became what was just described—a two-dimensional manifold. A space that is locally flat but globally curved. Then, if this piece of paper was crumpled into a messy ball and set on the desk, how many dimensions was it now?

Yu Xian initially thought that since it had become a three-dimensional shape and occupied three-dimensional space, it must be three-dimensional. Not quite. The answer was that it was still a two-dimensional manifold. This was because the information on the paper hadn’t been lost, and the paper itself hadn’t been destroyed. It had merely been "bent" and "folded" into a higher-dimensional space—that is, three-dimensional space. As long as one understood the rules of "unfolding" this paper ball and flattening it out again, one could still read the text on it.

This was the topological theorem known as the "invariance of dimension theorem." In other words, as long as space wasn’t torn apart, the number of dimensions wouldn’t change. But a "manifold" allowed researchers to study low-dimensional structures within high-dimensional spaces.

Yu Xian was reminded of the Two-Dimensional Foils in *Three-Body*. In the novel, a Two-Dimensional Foil compressed a three-dimensional object into two dimensions, dealing a devastating blow. To some extent, this actually violated the topological invariance of dimension theorem. Of course, that didn’t diminish his awe and love for the concept of Two-Dimensional Foils in the slightest.

Relying on his foundation in physics, he barely managed to understand these three concepts. But what did they mean when combined together? Yu Xian frowned, pondering carefully.

A Discrete Personality meant dismantling a person’s traits into countless building blocks.

A vectorized mapping meant translating these building blocks into mathematical coordinates.

But what about the high-dimensional topological manifold?

Knowledge was sneaking into his brain in a rather despicable manner. He could practically feel his brain sprouting new folds.