Chapter 9: Dreamscape: Understanding the Unfathomable

Du Qiu thought of many questions in an instant.

Why can this super machine accept his arrival? Could it be that the machine has become sentient?

No, no, as a doctorate in engineering, he must approach this scientifically.

If the machine can respond autonomously, then there’s only one possibility: it is an intelligent machine.

However, can the core of an intelligent machine really accept one’s consciousness from a dream?

On Blue Star, there has never been such a theory!

The artificial intelligence on Blue Star is still in its infancy and is all based on big data. Does this super machine also have a huge database?

Even if so, how does the consciousness from human dreams descend into the core of an intelligent machine?

On Blue Star, machines controlled by programs all have a chip that stores the program as their core.

For instance, industrial robots, intelligent home appliances, numerical control machining centers, and so on, all have a chip that runs the control program.

Strictly speaking, computers and smartphones are also considered such intelligent machines.

If one’s consciousness from a dream descends into the intelligent core, does it mean it enters the smart chip of this machine?

In the dreams he had before, Du Qiu always viewed everything from a god-like perspective.

He never thought that he would be inside something from a dream.

He subconsciously surveyed his surroundings and started to ponder over the starry specks before his eyes, wondering if these starry specks were akin to Blue Star’s control chips.

After all, who knows in which corner of the universe this super machine is located?

Du Qiu thought this way mainly because, before entering this place in his dream, he had wandered through quite a few universes. Naturally, his thoughts drifted to some place in the cosmos.

Maybe, this super machine is a product of some alien civilization. Since it’s an alien civilization, why should its design be the same as that of Blue Star?

Take the sci-fi movies from M country, for example; they always imagine aliens as unsightly monsters, but who knows if aliens might actually be more perfect than Blue Star people or even uglier, of course.

After all, the universe is vast with a variety of environments, so it is normal for any life that seems strange to Blue Star people to be born.

Du Qiu first assumed that this starry speck was the control chip. The information and images he received from here should be the conditions of some functional modules of the super machine running.

Thinking this way, Du Qiu became somewhat excited; he was, after all, a doctor of engineering, very interested in the operation of intelligent machines.

If the super giant machine in the dream is indeed some unknown alien civilization’s resource collection and purification production equipment, how much knowledge could that teach him?

After thinking for a while, Du Qiu tried to sense the egg-sized stars again.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long before he received the data stream.

“Seed 1008600363 basic shared module control program…”

Nice, it’s displayed in Chinese characters. Just seeing the beginning, Du Qiu sighed with relief.

However, why is it that the rest of the alien civilization’s smart core is also separated into lower and upper levels like Blue Star?

Continuing downward, Du Qiu felt somewhat astonished.

For some reason, the content below was no longer in Chinese characters. The characters seemed very simple, yet they were pictographic texts, not the alphabetic texts of the western world on Blue Star.

Because when Du Qiu looked at these characters, he felt that each one resembled some sort of figure, yet they were not as complex as Chinese characters.

He was a bit worried now; just now, he thought the dream was pretty good, with all the information he saw before in Chinese characters, so he wouldn’t be completely lost. Yet in a blink of an eye, it all changed.

As he read on, all the text was in this style; he counted, and the longest line had about 19 characters, the shortest had seven characters.

While he was reading, suddenly, Du Qiu understood the meaning of a line of text.

Translated into Chinese, it means “Conditions for executing the primary separation program.”

Du Qiu couldn’t help but feel delighted and hurriedly continued reading.

My God, he truly understood the meaning of the following line of text!

After spending some time, Du Qiu read through the entire basic shared module control program and was completely shaken inside.

His such descent in dreams is inexplicable, yet he is somehow able to understand the text here, hence the obstacle preventing him from learning here has vanished.

The basic shared module control program he just finished viewing has made Du Qiu realize that this language is like a hybrid of C language and assembly language on Blue Star.

As a doctor of mechanical and electronic engineering, mastering C language and assembly language was essential.

Moreover, Du Qiu is very proficient with various machine driving and control programs, not only is he extremely skilled with C language, but he can also manipulate the more fundamental assembly language.

With this foundation, after reading this basic shared module control program, he couldn’t help but admire and marvel internally.

Using this kind of language, similar to natural language, to write control programs for machines, the compiler involved must be very powerful.

You must understand that Blue Star’s computers were invented by the western world, so the programming languages are all based on natural language English.

But the program codes of every computer language, when listed, even though an English speaker can understand the vocabulary, put together, they do not mean what natural language conveys.

Yet the program text Du Qiu just saw is directly code, and the meaning of the text he saw is the action the program is supposed to execute.

This is also why Du Qiu concluded that this language is a natural language.

It’s known that the development of computer languages on Blue Star is a process of learning from and approaching natural language, but no computer language has ever achieved the level of natural language.

Before computers became intelligent, this wasn’t an issue, but when humans wanted computers to have intelligence like humans, it became a barrier.

Of course, many who study artificial intelligence now emphasize the limitations of hardware and software algorithms but rarely consider language to be a problem.

This is their greatest oversight. You must understand that language has been the greatest aid in the development of human wisdom. When there were no written languages, wisdom was passed down orally.

Wisdom has also developed through human interaction and exchange.

Du Qiu happens to be one of those people who think this way. In his view, to create artificial intelligence for computers, they must be able to understand natural human language.

If it is possible to create a kind of natural language, and programs written in it could make computers recognize, it would be like nurturing an infant.

Of course, this is just one of Du Qiu’s immature ideas. But now, in this peculiar dream, he really saw such a form of written language.

The ecstasy in his heart plunged him deep into the study of these programs.

As he understood more of the programs, Du Qiu gradually realized that these egg-sized stars are indeed the core elements.

He even found a converter that translates natural language programs into machine electronic signals. After studying this converter, Du Qiu was a bit stunned.

What kind of computer chip is this?