Riding the wind of rebirth

McGeve nodded and said, "I was shocked when I heard that the jar was worth fifty thousand dollars. Then I heard that not only could I exchange a bottle of wine for the jar, but I would also get one hundred thousand dollars. If I hadn't seen you succeed, I wouldn't have believed it was true."

"It's also good luck that I just happened to have something to exchange with them." Zhou Zhi said with a smile: "For a restaurant to have a bottle of world-class wine as its treasure is certainly better than a blue and white jar that is only used for decoration."

"This jar is to me what the Igon in 1882 was to them. No matter how much money you have, you may not be able to find the thing. If it weren't for this, I think I would have to spend a lot of time negotiating."

"I'm just really sorry that I have to choose another gift for my uncle and aunt."

"It's good enough that the thought is there. Let's make it clear first. Don't prepare such expensive gifts in the future." McGeve said, "One hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a bottle of wine. That's too much."

"I was actually lucky. I only spent a few thousand dollars, and I made back the money when I sold the suitcases," Zhou Zhi said. "The rest of Leopold Stokowski's belongings were all picked up for free."

"You should cherish something you found for free." McGeve said, "Otherwise, next time you see the porcelain you want, you won't have the chance to exchange it."

"But your treasure hunting story is really interesting. Tell me about it when you have time. Mr. Jeandenor said that his boss only spent 500 US dollars to pick up the jar from the flea market. Isn't it a hundred times the price?"

"This is normal. A staff member of Shaanxi Museum once went to a villager's home to look for cultural relics. He found a child playing with a white stone. When he took it in his hand, he found it was a white jade seal."

"The staff exchanged two pieces of candy with the child. After returning to the museum and cleaning it up, they found that it was the imperial seal of Empress Lü Zhi, the founding empress of the Han Dynasty. It is a priceless treasure. The exchange rate is immeasurable."

"Oh, isn't this kid at a disadvantage?"

"Uncle, in our country, all underground cultural relics after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 49 belong to the state. The ones that can be circulated must be inherited by the family before the founding of the People's Republic of China, or purchased from the national cultural relics store, or returned from overseas, before they can be traded."

"The kid said he picked up the seal from a ditch, so it should belong to the country."

"But now there are antique exchange markets everywhere in China, and many things have gone from black and gray to white after rolling around in them." Zhou Zhi sighed: "This is actually a big problem that is not conducive to the protection of cultural relics, making it extremely difficult to define many cultural relics that were originally stolen goods."

"Elbow," McGeve asked, "Are you studying science or liberal arts?"

"Oh, my undergraduate major is Chinese language, and my current focus is on the phonology and etymology of ancient Chinese." Zhou Zhi said, "I will have to defend my master's thesis when I return this time."

"Then why did Xiao Miao say that you are her collaborator? Isn't this a big leap?"

"This is a long story." Zhou Zhi smiled and said, "I have always been interested in liberal arts during my middle school years. I came into contact with computer technology and found that the promotion of computers in China would face a serious problem, that is, Chinese input." "Wasn't this problem solved a long time ago?" McGeoff asked in confusion, "A Mr. Wang came to the United States to study in 1995."

"Wang Yongmin invented the Wubi input method." Zhou Zhi said, "The input method solves the problem of retrieving the required Chinese characters from the character library through simple input. However, we still need to solve a problem that is more difficult than the input method, which is the problem of the Chinese character library itself."

"At that time, there was no unified Chinese character library. There was no suitable character library in China, and there were many character libraries in foreign countries, including Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and Singapore. Some Chinese characters also existed in some Malay, Japanese, and Korean languages."

"However, the encoding of these Chinese character libraries is completely inconsistent and cannot be used universally. The same input method will produce completely different results for five or six character libraries. Compared with the ASCII code, which fixed the English letters early on, this problem of Chinese character codes is very troublesome."

"Also, the Chinese characters in various character libraries are not complete, and even a large part is missing. We have now expanded the character library to more than 100,000 characters, while at that time, the general character library only had 5,000 or 6,000 characters, which was difficult to meet the wide range of needs."

"So I thought at the time that we should solve this problem once and for all before the information infrastructure is widely promoted, so as to avoid all kinds of troubles in future applications."

"For example, if a US computer is equipped with a Hong Kong typesetting system and then printed out with an island printer, it will involve various font library matching and adaptation work. For some scenarios, this trouble may be fatal."

"So we need to redesign a universal character library that can be expanded in multiple stages and eventually accommodate all Chinese characters, and even some special symbols commonly used in some Chinese character regions." Zhou Zhi smiled and said, "With this idea and preliminary design plan, I went to Shu University to find Academician Mai, and became a frequent visitor to the Computer Science Department."

"Even though the Hanwen Library has won the highest national science and technology award, I still think it is a standard liberal arts project." Zhou Zhi smiled and said, "Information technology only plays a tool role in the entire design process."

"Later, we designed many products, including graphic fuzzy matching recognition technology, digital library based on graph database, and so on."

"These technologies all have one thing in common, which is that they are somewhat different from traditional science and engineering information technology, are closer to the academic system of liberal arts, and are more suitable for various liberal arts projects."

"Once Xiao Miao joined us, all of our projects were greatly strengthened." Zhou Zhi couldn't stop talking about Mai Xiaomiao: "Because Xiao Miao's nonlinear mathematical theory and neuron-like model system are highly consistent with the direction we have been exploring, but our exploration is to explore its feasibility through peripheral application design, while Xiao Miao clearly told us the engineering path through theoretical research. As long as we follow the path she found, we will definitely achieve our goal!"

"No wonder..." McGeoff finally understood why Mai Xiaomiao stayed there and didn't come back. It turned out that there was already academic soil there, and after Mai Xiaomiao's seed went there, it would take root and sprout immediately.

He still doesn't know if the plant is taking root or sprouting, as it has already produced many flowers and fruits.

"In this case, we don't have to worry about Xiao Miao being there." McGeve nodded: "You guys take care..."

I wanted to say "you two should get along well", but when the words came to my lips, I suddenly remembered that Zhou Zhi had not yet passed the test of his wife, so I changed the subject temporarily: "You two should study hard and promote each other." (End of this chapter)