Chapter 33
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A month later, in the outskirts of Shangdu next to the coast, a warehouse off the beaten track.
Chen Chen hit the final key. A progress bar flashed and a compressed package appeared on the computer desktop.
Chen Chen started up the Android emulator, then installed and ran the compressed package.
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After that, the interface of the emulator flashed and a transparent layer unfurled swiftly, covering the entire screen.
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Having done that, Chen Chen pulled up an English webpage on the emulator. The webpage flickered and dense rows of red Chinese characters appeared between the lines of English.
It was a translation of the English sentences into Chinese.
Moreover, the translated text did not contain logical flaws. It simply lacked craft and thus, appeared rather stiff.
Nonetheless, compared to most translation software, this was much more convenient.
Then, Chen Chen switched over to the interface of the translation software and went to the options of translation modes. Currently, the default mode was “embedded translation”.
Below this option, there were two other modes of “replacement translation” and “contrastive translation.”
In addition, one could adjust the font and color of the translated text.
After some thought, Chen Chen selected the replacement translation option, then returned to the English webpage.
This time, there were no red translated words that appeared between the original lines. Instead, all the English words of the entire webpage had been directly replaced with Chinese characters.
The astonishing thing was that this change did not disrupt the structure of the webpage at all. It appeared as if this webpage was a Chinese website in the first place.
After making sure that this software had no problems, Chen Chen sighed in relief. He suddenly spoke to the screen before him, “X, help me add a layer of dynamic protection to the program and convert it into three formats: Android, IOS, and PC. I’ll leave the rest to you.”
“Yes, Father.”
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Suddenly, a childish voice piped up from the speaker. Without any human control, the computer automatically opened up various software and the liquid cooling case of the main computer started to buzz and revolve!
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If a stranger was watching, they would have yelled in alarm. The four computers linked up with each other, forming a computing cluster. The screen of each computer flashed rapidly as if someone with an incredible reaction time was using the four computers at the same time.
In no time at all, the computers had quickly finished off a workload that would have taken days or weeks for humans. At the moment, Chen Chen had not even finished washing his face.
X was a piece of program code that Chen Chen had stripped from the game Oasis.
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Besides its graphics, Oasis also had a large number of NPCs. These NPCs were still considered to be weak artificial intelligence that had no real consciousness. Still, their level of intelligence undoubtedly surpassed all current AI.
The program derived from this group of NPCs was the main code of this X.
Through an algorithm similar to, but more complex than, the artificial fish swarm algorithm, the program simulated the neural fluctuations of the human brain. This program could simulate up to eighty percent of human thinking and was even capable of logic.
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In the past, the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing, once defined a concept:
Let a human and an intelligent machine conduct random questions and exchanges without knowing each other’s identity. If more than thirty percent of the human testers did not realize that they were communicating with a computer, this meant that the computer possessed “human intelligence”.
This was called the “Turing Test”.
Obviously, X’s intelligence had reached the point where it could easily pass the Turing Test. It was even close to Jarvis from Iron Man.
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Even so, this did not mean that X was an intelligent lifeform because it was essentially still a product of endless programming. It did not have self-awareness or the ability to think like humans.
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To prevent the plot of The Terminator from happening, Chen Chen had placed several restrictions on X.
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These included rules implanted in the core program such as: Any command of Chen Chen’s would become the highest order, self-replication was forbidden, no online information was to be received before Chen Chen’s authorization, and so on.
After all, Chen Chen had learned from the mistake of his predecessors. Previously, an artificial intelligence named Tay, released by Microsoft, spent only one day on the internet and it became a racist, Nazi-supporting “bad girl”.
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Nevertheless, X and Tay were poles apart. The exchange between Chen Chen and X alone would stun many engineers who had studied computational semantics.
In general, a voice assistant could complete certain tasks within its capability through the user’s voice. For instance, a user could access their cellphone’s voice assistant and casually command, “Call XXX.” The voice assistant would be able to help the user carry out the task of making the phone call.
However, who had ever seen a user say a magical command like “You’re already a mature voice assistant and should learn how to do things yourself. Help me finish off the rest of the work, okay?”
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If the voice assistant truly finished the work, that user would wet his pants in fright.
By the time Chen Chen had finished washing up, X had completed the work Chen Chen asked of it. Three brand-new compressed packages had been fully encapsulated and were waiting tidily on the desktop.
“X, what kind of name should I give this software?” Chen Chen suddenly wanted to test X’s intelligence once again.
“Father, as my creator, you should know that I’m not equipped with any creative modules.” X sounded a little aggrieved.
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“Alright, in that case, this translation software shall be named Little X Translation Assistant. After all, it’s mined from your core intelligence,” Chen Chen said after a moment of pondering.
“Very well, Father.” On the computer screen, the three fully encapsulated, compressed packages were automatically renamed to [Little X Translation Assistant].
“Have they been tested for bugs?” Chen Chen dried his hair while asking.
“Not at the moment, Father.”
X’s childlike voice replied again, “If you wish to perform a new round of improvement, it’ll take around 325 hours of testing. Do you want to carry out the testing?”
“Nah, just send the compressed packages to the mailboxes I’ve specified.”
Chen Chen thought about it. In any case, the software had its user error window. After it was officially released, many users would naturally send over bug reports. There was no need for him to waste more time on testing.
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“Understood, Father.”
X answered in its innocent voice and opened up a few mailboxes in a multi-line operation. After that, the recently packaged software was sent out.
Along with the delivered software, a short introduction was attached.
“This product is equipped with powerful language processing technology. Unlike other translation software, it tries its best to recapture the meaning of the original text. Moreover, it has seamless intelligent pattern-processing capabilities and is able to process foreign languages into the user’s language without affecting the layout of the webpage.”
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