Legend of the Cyber Heroes

"That's not right, is it?" Yuki frowned. "Master, it doesn't seem to be the case. In card and board games... and also, driving, computers are much better than biological brains."

Xiang Shan nodded, "That's correct, but a computer that is good at playing chess can only play chess. It will never understand 'why to play chess,' and it might not even know that it is 'playing chess'. If its creator doesn't give instructions, then it will never think to do a second thing in its life."

Should this be... something that happened a very long time ago? Xiang Shan felt that this might be history that occurred before he was born. At that time, there was a conductor. He was a patient with Trisomy 21—the so-called 'innate idiot'. Perhaps he was only acting out 'conducting' as a game because he was born into a musical family, but he indeed took the stage as a 'conductor'. So, did the concept of 'music' exist in his brain?

Maybe indeed, the poor soul knew what music was.

But he couldn't quite understand things outside of 'music'.

And the intelligence nurtured within computers is even more extreme. After all, even an 'innate idiot' knows hunger, thirst, and cries when uncomfortable. But an AI powerful enough to crush a champion chess player would not develop thoughts like 'I need power' or 'I want more computing resources'."

"In fact, computers have never been capable of doing anything beyond part of the human brain. Pen-and-paper calculations... damn it, you seem to not know what 'paper' is." Xiang Shan shook his head and with a hand-held piece of iron, he scribbled 'q and p' on the ground.

Two values, 1 or 0, TRUE or FALSE.

Two produces three, three produces everything.

Everything about the computer comes from here.

"What I'm going to teach you now is called 'Boolean operation,'" said Xiang Shan. "Humans can perform Boolean operations with an iron rod, thus simulating any computer program—no, it should be the other way around. Computers are just a substitute for human hands, writing Boolean equations on the ground. They are merely faster, much faster than handwriting by humans. That's all there is to it."

"The way this operation works was born from the great George Boole. Before George Boole, Leibniz and Babbage were doing the same thing—they tried to use machines to calculate. Babbage might once have come close to this state, but ultimately he did not achieve it. Boole was different from all his predecessors. Just as Isaac Newton tried to describe the trajectory of material movement in the dimensions of time and space, Boole tried to describe the trajectory of mental movement. This was an epoch-making achievement. Of course, the gap between Boolean algorithms and real human thought is like that between Newtonian mechanics and the real world. But this was already a start."

"After Boole, people realized that gears and levers can perform calculations, neural networks can perform calculations, incessantly opening and closing electrical circuits can perform calculations—even a pile of chemical equipment can carry out calculations—Boolean algorithms broke down a corner of human thought into something machines could comprehend."

The history of humans using circuits to simulate neural networks and execute Boolean computations even predates the Von Neumann architecture—back in 1943, neurobiologist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts created the first artificial neural network capable of executing Boolean computations.

Before Boole's time, there was another inventor, Joseph Jacquard. He invented a new kind of loom. This loom could use punch cards to manipulate the machine's needles and weave the warp and weft. Similar things have independently appeared many times throughout history. These 'punch cards' can even be traced back to the Eastern Han Dynasty in China.

This is the ancestor of the 'punched tape' of the Turing Machine, the simplest form of storage with only a few bytes, the earliest 'memory' of machines.

And it was the program proposed by Hilbert for the study of pure mathematics that spurred the birth of the Turing Machine.

In the end, these findings were ultimately converged into the hands of another person named Von Neumann.

With this, an unprecedented tool in human history was born. Human society, life, politics, and military were all changed because of it.

"But in the end, a tool is just a tool," Xiang Shan cautioned his disciple. "Its essence is still the creation of thousands, tens of thousands of arms to perform Boolean operations for you. What a computer can do, you can do with Boolean operation yourself, it's only that the computer is faster—and of course, this kind of 'fast' has already become a fundamental change."

"For the average user, you just give the task to these 'many arms', and you can wait for the results. But you can't develop Inner Strength that way. Those who achieve Inner Strength are those who can maximally utilize the power of these myriad arms, even transmitting their will among these hands."

"So, you must start learning from Boolean operations."

In the realm of Inner Strength, mathematics is 'the Way,' and Boolean operation is 'one'.

The Way produces one, one produces two, two produces three, and three produces everything.

Boolean algorithms are not complex in themselves, being merely an extension of logic. High school level mathematics is about enough to get started.

The rest is a lot of practice.

Xiang Shan took some time to explain the essentials of these problems to Yuki, then composed an exercise book in his mind and transmitted it directly to Yuki's brain chip via point-to-point transfer.

Yuki left the room with a very heavy step.

Xiang Shan nodded in satisfaction. He had a feeling—he'd been wanting to do this for a while now.

He wasn't sure why. Maybe it was due to past experiences? Anyway, he was quite happy.

.............................................

Yuki finally finished the exercises and returned to his room.

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

Xiang Shan was sitting with his eyes closed, meditating in front of the terminal. On the terminal screen, countless symbols appeared and vanished like a refreshing cascade. More code layered over the existing code.

Meanwhile, the canine prosthetic body linked to that terminal was performing various actions.

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

He was attempting to master components the likes of which he had never encountered before.

"Yuki, have you finished the exercises?" Xiang Shan maintained his original posture. "Is your brain chip the kind that can be removed at any time? Is it convenient for you to show me one now?"

Yuki nodded, "It's possible..."

He bowed his head, and the back of his skull opened. A spare chip popped out.

The drive chips for a prosthetic body always number two or more. When one crashes due to a BUG, another instantly takes control of the body, while the crashed one quickly performs a Watchdog, rebooting itself.

Unlike Xiang Shan's integrated skull, Yuki's modern artificial skull was designed for easy access.

Yuki handed over his spare chip to Xiang Shan, "Master, what are you doing?"

"It'll be done in no time. I'll explain when I've finished," Xiang Shan shook his head. He had initially been careless for not noticing this. In this era, the power wielded by those above over the lives of the weak was even more grave than he had imagined. At first, he had just discovered that Doctor Schultz had invited him to go online, so he naively concluded that the majority of cybernetic limbs weren't always connected to the network.

When he took Yuki as a disciple, he only thought of avoiding the village's surveillance routes.

But the Town Mayor's words had reminded him.

No matter what society is like, one should never underestimate a tyrant's plunder of people.

In fact, there should be a frequency band that ordinary people don't know about or simply can't use. On this non-civilian band, all prosthetic bodies are connected to the network—only their users are unaware of it.

The only consolation is that those in the "true ruling groups" seem to be understaffed or have other objective difficulties and are not monitoring everyone around the clock.

—Tsk... It mustn't have been this severe in the past.

—But, I should have contemplated such an extreme state.

"Practice martial arts without honing skills, in the end, all is in vain." The initial design of Inner Strength included the idea of resisting such a state.

Therefore, after restoring some of his own Inner Strength, Xiang Shan built for Yuki the power to resist external maladies, cleansing any backdoors within the chip.

Soon, Xiang Shan had thoroughly checked the chip. As expected, it contained several protocols he hadn't seen before, pointing to ports with signal transmission capabilities.

The port used shortwave communication; the signal was weak, and the data transmission capacity was limited—probably only enough to upload low-quality audio or images.

But that meant that rulers could indeed spy on anyone, anytime.

"Good, at least it's fortunate that this era lacks armies and police, and the Lords have too much discretionary power... At most, they'll realize that I might be a Hero."

Xiang Shan quickly wrote a firewall into Yuki's chip to block remote access to that particular port and sent forged images, then erased several other protocols.

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

Xiang Shan returned the chip to Yuki, saying, "Try it yourself and let me know if anything is amiss. If there are no issues, help me with something later."

Xiang Shan now operated his prosthetic body with a cheap chip given by the Town Mayor, and that drive chip was also likely to have a backdoor. Xiang Shan's artificial skull wasn't as easily accessible as Yuki's. Without specialized tools, he had to rely on someone else to remove the implanted chip.

It was equivalent to exposing one's brain to another person. Xiang Shan needed a trustworthy assistant to dare to do such a thing.

Moreover, he had to prevent the situation where in the middle of the process, the assistant was remotely brain-controlled and inadvertently poked into his own brain. That's why he chose to empower Yuki first.

While transmitting his math assignments to Xiang Shan for review, Yuki followed Xiang Shan's instructions, hopping and running around to test if the drive chip had any BUGs.

Humanity learned early on not to aim for bug-free programming. As long as the program runs, bugs are tolerable.

High-level programming languages can, according to Type Theory, be broadly divided into "type-unsafe languages," "type-safe languages," and "strongly-typed languages." Strongly-typed languages can indeed ensure "no errors," as they can provide unique outcomes for any program and halt without fail, never falling into infinite loops. However, because strongly-typed languages relinquish the concept of loops and lose Turing completeness, any erroneous system is unrecognized and not allowed to run.

Simply put, a strongly-typed language means "if the program runs, it will absolutely not error, but if there is even a smidgen of error, it won't run at all."

Heroes, on the other hand, tend to use type-unsafe languages. Users of this language are accustomed to the confusion of "Why won't my code run? What's the reason? My code runs? What's the reason?" This language easily leads to "unpredictable errors"—a kind of unpredictability that could be said to be destined by mathematics itself, unknowable even to the coder until the program is running.

Naturally, this "hard to understand" aspect applies to enemies as well.

Xiang Shan would rather go to the trouble of conducting multiple tests before writing any program and choose "type-unsafe languages."

But it seemed that Xiang Shan's skills were truly sufficient. Yuki's drive chip was still able to control the prosthetic body normally.