Volume 1 Chaos Comes Chapter 18 AI Structure
On Thursday morning, I finished reading the paper and organized my thoughts, then excitedly made an appointment with Ai Bishui to meet at the entrance of the science building.
The April sunshine was warm and soft, and the shadows of people and trees on the ground were only faint. Sparrows gathered in groups of three or five in the newly green flower beds, and the chirping sounds carried the smell of soil.
At this moment, the wind is warm, the smoke is light, and the weather is slightly warm.
When I got to the door, she was concentrating on reading the wall of instructions. I noticed that her hair was about five centimeters shorter than the last time we met, and it fell naturally on her shoulders as before. She was wearing a short white T-shirt with strings on her upper body, fluffy sweatpants with cuffs on her lower body, and an open linen sweatshirt on top.
When she saw me, she stretched out her hands and waved.
Ai Bishui and I walked side by side, passing through a bright corridor with a large floor-to-ceiling window on one side. Inside the window was a simple perspective formed by straight lines, while outside the glass wall was overflowing with bright spring light.
"By the way, how's your article going?"
I had mixed feelings at the time. I hoped that it would eventually be published but I also didn’t want the success to come too easily. Perhaps it was jealousy that made me do that.
"Well... the reviewer made some suggestions for revisions, and Professor Xie said it should be passable after the revisions."
"What does Mr. Xie think of it?"
"He was so excited." The girl smiled brightly. "He told me that the etching method in the article is so amazing that he would even name it after me. It might be called 'Eschrich configuration' or something like that..."
AI Structure... I have a vague feeling that this name is a dangerous metaphor.
While I was thinking about the name, a tall man came towards me pushing a multi-layered flatbed cart with a pile of heavy-looking rectangular instruments on it.
"Hey, you two...good morning." Mai Ge showed a somewhat lewd smile, greeted us and passed by. He was the person I least wanted to run into.
"The cart contains a microwave source and an oscilloscope with a built-in WIN7 operating system, but we don't need them for our experiments." Ai Bishui turned her head and took a look , her hair flying and hitting my shoulders. "It feels like the total amount of stuff on that flatbed cart is almost one million."
"Ah? You mean one million RMB?"
"Yeah, with the wires and stuff it might be even more than that. This isn't expensive at all among scientific research instruments. In fact, the MOKE we used to play with every day is much more valuable than those."
A country's comprehensive strength can be seen not only in the military, the Olympics or the space race, but also in the scientific research carried out every day.
We pushed the door open and walked into a bright classroom. The sunlight outside the window was not blocked by the ivy and poured freely on the empty tables and chairs, illuminating the flying dust in the room.
After she walked in, she jumped lightly onto the table in the first row, swinging her legs that were hanging in front of the table back and forth.
My gaze slowly moved upwards and I saw that her eyes were full of anticipation.
"Well... after discussing this with you, I have been wondering if there is a more... more interesting system to implement the theory I learned before, and then I found that the nervous system actually operates under the dynamics of self-organization."
"Emmmm, I have heard of this, but I don't know if it's the same thing as what you are talking about."
Even if she knew this, it wouldn't be surprising, after all, her knowledge of physics is unfathomable.
"This is a universal phenomenon, it seems that self-organized criticality exists uniformly in the brains of various organisms, and has the same critical index..." She pondered for a moment, "Do you want to do some experiments related to brain science? For example, cooperate with the Department of Biology?"
"Yes... Actually, this is a very famous conclusion." I said as I walked up to the podium. "But I don't need to find a biology department in my idea."
I picked up the chalk and walked over to the blackboard, drawing a simple flow chart as I spoke.
"Now we know exactly how to control the inputs to drive the dynamics of a magnetic system, which means we can freely control the microscopic internal structure through macroscopic inputs."
“And as far as I know… people also have enough data to characterize the dynamics of the nervous system, and the data to characterize it are similar to what we have previously manipulated in solid materials.”
Before I could continue writing, Ai Bishui spoke.
"You want to... adjust the state of the magnetic material to the mode of the human brain? And then see if there will be behaviors similar to those of the human brain, such as thinking or consciousness?"
"Yes, I think the human brain can be replicated to create true artificial intelligence."
This kind of artificial intelligence is not a pile of logical processes, but a truly intelligent individual that is consistent with the brain of a biological organism in terms of its structure.
As soon as I finished speaking, an indescribable fear suddenly rose from my heart. I was dazed for a moment and hurriedly held on to the podium with my hands.
Ai Bishui was thinking about something and didn't notice anything unusual about me.
"This is a great idea... The computing power of this structure will be much greater than that of existing CPUs."
She picked up a piece of chalk and walked to the podium. "I remember that the maximum number of equivalent transistors in existing chips is about 100 billion." She wrote 10 to the 11th power on the blackboard. "An interesting coincidence is that this is exactly the same as the number of neurons in the human brain."
"But each transistor is just a logic switch. We cannot assume that it can independently realize functions similar to neurons."
"That's right. So the complexity of the chip is actually much lower than that of the human brain, and it is difficult for intelligence to emerge from it."
I have reservations about this. There are already many AI programs that look very human, such as the chatbot.
"However, if we consider a ferromagnetic system, we can use the cobalt iron boron (CoFeB) alloy most commonly used in magnetic laboratories as an example. Its lattice constant (the length of the side of the lattice) is about 3 times 10 to the negative 10th power of meters."
She was writing quickly on the blackboard, and I had automatically switched to a state of concentrating on listening to the class. This was a conditioned reflex after being with her for a long time.
"Here we can roughly assume that there is a spin in each lattice. Suppose we take a small piece of one millimeter square, let me see how many spins there are in total..." She wrote the formula on the blackboard and calculated the result mentally:
"There are 3.7 times 10 to the 19th . Even if we assume that 10,000 spins make up a neuron, we can get 370 trillion equivalent nerve cells, which is 100,000 times the number of the human brain."
This number is very shocking. The most fundamental property of a complex system is that as the number of individuals inside it increases, the entire system will exhibit completely different new properties than before. If a brain structure with such a large number of nerve cells can really be created, I wonder what kind of wisdom it can produce.
"Are we... sure we want to do this?" I didn't notice that my forearms were shaking slightly when I said this.
"Hmm? Isn't this the idea you came up with?" She turned to look at me, a faint blush on her face. "Do you have any literature or data on the nervous system? Can you send it to me?"
"Yes, yes...I'll send it to you when I get back to the dormitory."
"OK!"
She moved her hand holding the chalk up and down, and I felt that I had rarely felt such pure joy since elementary school.
