Chapter 20: Boolean Operations

"That doesn't seem right, does it?" Youji frowned. "Master, it doesn't seem to be that way. In board games... and even in driving, computers are far superior to biological brains."

Xiang Shan nodded. "That is true, but a computer that is excellent at chess can only play chess. It will never understand 'why' one plays chess, and it might not even know it is 'playing chess' at all. If its creator provides no instructions, it will never be able to do a second thing for the rest of its existence."

This must have been... a very, very long time ago. Xiang Shan felt that this was history that had occurred before he was even born. Back then, there was a conductor. He was a patient with Trisomy 21—a so-called "congenital idiot." Perhaps he only treated "mimicking conducting motions" as a game because he was born into a family of musicians, yet he truly took to the stage as a "conductor." Did "music" exist within his brain?

Perhaps, indeed, this poor soul did know what music was.

But beyond "music," there was little he could comprehend.

And the intelligence nurtured within a computer is even more extreme than that. After all, even a person with congenital cognitive impairment knows when they are hungry or thirsty. They cry when their body is uncomfortable. But an AI whose chess ability is sufficient to crush a grandmaster will never have a thought like, "I need power," or "I want more computational resources."

"In reality, what a computer can do has never exceeded the capabilities of the human brain. Pen and paper calculations... hell, you probably don't even know what 'paper' is." Xiang Shan shook his head, casually picked up an iron rod, and wrote 'q and p' on the ground.

Two values: 1 or 0, TRUE or FALSE.

Two gives birth to three, and three gives birth to all things.

Everything in computing stems from this.

"What I am about to teach you is called 'Boolean logic,'" Xiang Shan said. "Humans can use an iron rod to perform Boolean operations on the ground, thereby simulating any computer program—no, it should be the other way around. Computers merely replace human hands, writing Boolean equations on the ground. They are simply faster, much faster, than human hands. That is all."

"This method of calculation was born from the great George Boole. Before George Boole, Leibniz and Babbage were doing the same thing—they tried to perform calculations using machines. Babbage may have approached this realm once, but ultimately, he did not reach it. Boole was different from all his predecessors. Much like how Isaac Newton attempted to describe the trajectory of material motion in the dimensions of time and space, Boole attempted to describe the trajectory of mental motion. This was a groundbreaking achievement. Of course, the gap between Boolean algorithms and true human thought is like the gap between Newtonian mechanics and the real world. But it is a start."

"After Boole, people realized that gears and levers could perform calculations, neural networks could perform calculations, continuously switching circuits could perform calculations, and even a pile of chemical equipment could perform calculations—Boolean algorithms dismantled a corner of human thought into something machines could understand."

The history of humans using circuits to simulate neural networks and perform Boolean calculations predates even the von Neumann architecture—as early as 1943, neurobiologist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts created the first artificial neural network capable of performing Boolean calculations.

And even before Boole's era, there was an inventor named Joseph Marie Jacquard. He invented a brand-new loom. This loom could use punched cards to manipulate the needles and threads on the machine, weaving the warp and weft. Similar things have appeared independently in history many times. These "punched cards" can even be traced back to the Eastern Han Dynasty in China.

This was the ancestor of the "punched paper tape" of the Turing machine, the most primitive memory with only a few bytes—the earliest "memories" of machines.

And the program Hilbert proposed for the sake of pure mathematics fueled the birth of the Turing machine.

Ultimately, these results converged in the hands of another man named John von Neumann.

With this, a tool unprecedented in human history was born. Human society, life, and even politics and warfare were changed by it.

"But a tool is, after all, just a tool," Xiang Shan cautioned his disciple. "Its essence remains the creation of thousands, tens of thousands of arms to perform Boolean operations for you. What a computer can do, you can do yourself using Boolean operations; it is just that the computer is faster—though, of course, this 'speed' has reached a fundamental change."

"For the average user, you just need to hand the task over to these 'countless arms' and wait for the result. But you won't develop 'inner strength' that way. Those who achieve true inner strength are able to maximize the power of these countless arms, and even transmit their will between these hands."

"Therefore, you must start by learning Boolean operations."

In the realm of inner strength, mathematics is the "Dao," and Boolean operations are the "One."

The Dao gives birth to One, One to two, two to three, and three to all things.

Boolean algorithms themselves are not complex; they are merely an extension of logic. High school-level mathematics is almost enough to get started.

The rest is a matter of extensive practice.

Xiang Shan spent some time explaining the essence of these problems to Youji, then directly compiled a problem set in his mind and transmitted it point-to-point into Youji's brain chip.

Youji's footsteps as he left the room were very heavy.

Xiang Shan nodded with satisfaction. He had a feeling—this was something he had wanted to try for a long time.

He didn't know why; perhaps it was the influence of his past experiences?

Regardless, he was quite pleased.

...

Youji finally finished the exercises and returned to his room.

Then he discovered that the atmosphere in the room had completely changed.

Xiang Shan sat with his eyes closed, facing the terminal as if in meditation. On the terminal screen, countless symbols appeared and disappeared as if refreshing. More code layered over code.

And the canine prosthetic connected to the terminal was performing various movements.

Xiang Shan was contemplating the meaning of every line of code, then replacing the original code with his own.

He was trying to master these components he had never seen before.

"Youji, have you finished the exercises?" Xiang Shan kept his original posture. "Is your brain chip the type that can be removed at any time? Would it be convenient to let me see one now?"

Youji nodded. "I suppose I can..."

He lowered his head, and the rear of his skull opened. A backup chip popped out.

Prosthetic driver chips always come in pairs or more. When one crashes due to a bug, the other instantly takes over the body, and the crashed one undergoes a rapid watchdog reset and re-enables.

Unlike the integrated skull Xiang Shan possessed, the modern artificial skull Youji had was designed to be opened easily.

Youji handed his backup chip to Xiang Shan. "Master, what are you doing?"

"It will be done soon. I'll tell you about it when it's finished." Xiang Shan shook his head. He had been too careless not to notice this earlier. In this era, the power of those in high positions to decide the life and death of the weak was even more severe than he had imagined. He had naively concluded that most cyber-prosthetics were not constantly connected to the network simply because Dr. Schultz had asked him to go online.

When he took Youji as his disciple, he only thought about avoiding the village's surveillance routes.

But the town mayor's words earlier had reminded him.

No matter what society is like, never underestimate the predation of people by tyrants.

In reality, there must exist a frequency band that ordinary people do not know about, or simply cannot access. On this non-civilian frequency, all prosthetics are connected to the network—it's just that the users of those prosthetics do not know it.

The only fortunate thing is that the current "true ruling groups" seem to be understaffed, or face other objective difficulties, and are not monitoring everyone every second.

...Tch... it shouldn't have been this severe in the past.

...But I should have anticipated this extreme state.

"Practicing martial arts without practicing internal power leads to nothing in the end." The design of internal power already included the concept of resisting such states from the very beginning.

Therefore, after restoring a bit of his own internal power, Xiang Shan began to build up the power for Youji to resist external evils, clearing the backdoors from the chip.

Soon, Xiang Shan had thoroughly scanned the entire chip. Just as he expected, there were indeed several protocols he had never seen before, pointing to certain ports equipped with signal transmission capabilities.

These ports used short-wave communication; the signal was relatively weak, and data transmission capacity was limited. He estimated it could only upload low-quality audio or images.

But this meant that the rulers could indeed spy on any individual at any time.

"Very well, at least it is fortunate that there is no army or police in this era, and the lords have too much discretionary power... The most they can realize is that I might be a vigilante."

Xiang Shan quickly wrote a firewall into Youji's chip, making it refuse remote access from that specific port and sending forged images instead. Then he erased the other protocols.

Of course, before doing all this, he made a backup.

Xiang Shan returned the chip to Youji and said, "Try it yourself and tell me if anything feels wrong. If there are no issues, do me a favor later."

Xiang Shan himself was currently operating his prosthetic using the cheap chip gifted by the mayor. That driver chip likely had a backdoor as well. Xiang Shan's artificial skull was not like Youji's, which could open and close freely. Without special tools, he had to rely on someone else to help him remove the chip inserted inside.

This was equivalent to exposing his brain to another person. Xiang Shan had to have a trusted assistant to dare to do such a thing.

Furthermore, he had to prevent the situation where "the assistant is remotely brain-controlled halfway through, and their finger twitches and pokes into his brain." That was why he had prioritized "instilling knowledge" for Youji.

While Youji was transmitting his math homework for Xiang Shan to check, he followed Xiang Shan's instructions, running and jumping around to test if the driver chip had any bugs.

Humans learned very early on that "don't strive for bug-free programming"; as long as the program could run, the existence of bugs didn't matter.

High-level languages, according to "type theory" classifications, can be roughly divided into "type-unsafe languages," "type-safe languages," and "strongly normalized languages." Strongly normalized languages can guarantee "no errors"; such languages can provide a unique result for any program and halt, absolutely never falling into an infinite loop. But precisely because strongly normalized languages abandon the concept of "loops" and lose Turing completeness, any error results in the system failing to recognize the code, refusing to run it.

Simply put, a strongly normalized language is a situation where "if the program runs, it will absolutely not make a mistake, but if there is even the slightest error, it won't run at all."

And vigilantes tend to use "type-unsafe languages." Users of this language live their daily lives in the confusion of "My code won't run? Why is that? My code is running? Why is that?" This language easily produces "unforeseeable errors"—this "unforeseeability" can be said to be destined by mathematics itself; before the program runs, even the author themselves cannot predict it.

Of course, this "incomprehensibility" is the same for the enemy.

Xiang Shan would rather go through the trouble of performing several tests before writing any program than choose anything other than a "type-unsafe language."

But Xiang Shan's skill seemed to be quite good. Youji's driver chip was still able to control the prosthetic normally.