Riding the wind of rebirth

"For example, a famous line of poetry, 'The rooster crows, the moon shines on the thatched inn; footprints are on the frosty plank bridge,' is a single character, all nouns, or nouns used as attributives. But anyone who understands Chinese will have a vivid and detailed image in their mind."

"In that scene, only the visual movement of objects depicts the signs of a cold and desolate early autumn morning, but it is very difficult to get machines to connect with them, understand them, and simulate the information they evoke in our minds."

"Because it has broken through the constraints of traditional grammar, it has reached the point where the author conveys imagery to the reader through words, and the reader, based on the information provided by the author, creates a secondary work in their mind according to their own cognition and understanding, and obtains the output result."

"Everyone's experience is different; this is what is meant by 'a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes'."

"In the world of linear logic, we can even say that this problem has no possibility of being solved. Computers can only execute rigid, straightforward expressions that are highly logical but shallow in level."

"This is exactly the approach taken by major mainstream information systems at present."

"But can we imagine what future information systems will look like? Or, can we create a way for computers to understand 'the crowing of roosters, the moon shining over thatched inn, footprints on the frosty plank bridge,' and present us with a beautiful painting or a piece of poignant music..."

"Wouldn't the world become a more wonderful place if we could turn these kinds of 'unsolvable' problems into 'solvable' ones?"

"I believe the answer is yes. Replacing simple tools with complex ones to accomplish increasingly complex tasks is itself the driving force behind human progress."

"The neuron-like computing power matrix structure, a non-linear mathematical tool, can solve this difficult problem that is hard to handle in the world of linear logic."

"The Chinese-language environment has provided us with a rich testing ground for this kind of experiment."

Next, Mai Xiaomiao shifted the topic of her presentation to graph databases, neural networks, and nonlinear algorithms, and listed several related research projects since the establishment of the digital library.

By analyzing the most primitive oracle bone script radicals, the system uses an associative function to perform "associative" analysis on undefined oracle bone characters and infer their meanings.

First, astronomical information is retrieved from ancient books. Then, the correlation between important celestial phenomena in historical records and actual astronomical phenomena is analyzed to deduce the specific events that occurred in major historical events, thereby establishing a relatively reliable historical chronology.

By cross-validating the phonetic information recorded in dialect databases and related classical texts, poems, and songs, the most scientific Middle Chinese pronunciation can be reconstructed.

Because it was a Unicode conference related to written characters, Zhou Zhi didn't have Mai Xiaomiao extensively publicize the achievements already made by the Clover Group. Instead, he selected several important projects related to characters to introduce, emphasizing the feasibility of this methodology. Even so, these projects greatly satisfied the representatives of the Unicode Consortium. Furthermore, these application scenarios perfectly aligned with their stereotypical impression of China's information technology work as "abstract." In their minds, this system, which is currently considered cutting-edge science and technology, being used by the Chinese to strengthen research in the humanities aligns more with their understanding and even expectations of China.

The newly appointed chairman of the organization, Tom Lee Vincent, was very satisfied with this. In his closing remarks, he gave special support and recognition to China's contributions to global information coding technology, especially within the framework of the Unicode protocol.

In his speech, Vincent expressed his gratitude for the tremendous contributions of Chinese information workers. He believes that with the unexpected early resolution of the most difficult part of the global coding effort—the Asian ideographic script region—the formation of a unified global character encoding framework is no longer a distant dream. This is because, during the implementation of the Asian ideographic script region, Chinese colleagues have made significant progress in the encoding of many scripts, shared these research results with the world, and led Japan and South Korea to quickly follow suit and solve their own countries' ideographic script encoding problems.

These valuable experiences will soon be applied to many languages ​​and scripts, including Tibetan, Yi, Hindi, and Arabic. Moreover, based on the remarkable achievements of our Chinese colleagues in "reviving" oracle bone script, the oldest Chinese script, at the information and electronic system level, everyone has seen the dawn of hope for the electronic collection, systematic preservation, and information-based research of many ancient scripts in the long history of the world.

Their efforts have ensured that all the characters left by humankind are preserved and passed down in the form of informational products. Undoubtedly, this is a significant contribution to world civilization made by our outstanding Chinese counterparts.

The conference concluded with enthusiastic applause from the attendees.

This was the first time China had hosted an information technology conference as a major contributor. With the attention from all parties, the conference was a great success. For the first time, work on Unicode, the Hanwen Large Character Library, digital libraries, and the digitization research of oracle bone script truly came into the public eye.

There's one thing about humanities subjects that's both an advantage and a disadvantage: regardless of whether you're an expert or not, whether you truly understand or are genuinely confused, you can still offer your opinions on most things. As a result, with the media's extensive coverage, this matter has sparked heated discussions across the country.

However, most parents see the "integration of arts and sciences" aspect and believe that it will be a mainstream direction for future development. As a result, they have higher expectations for their children and often talk about "comprehensive interdisciplinary talents." They expect Chinese literature majors to know programming and physics majors to know classical Chinese, which makes it impossible to reason with them.

Mai Xiaomiao's speech was quite long and very important in the industry, but it only flashed by for a few seconds in the news. Although it aroused everyone's curiosity, it was transformed into a "representative of youth speeches" under the deliberate guidance of relevant parties.

This is a common practice at forums, and it's more of a way for the organizers to express their vision and stance for the future. Although it's not like that at all in Mai Xiaomiao's case, it doesn't prevent the general public and even some uninformed media from understanding it that way.

What many people don't understand is that Mai Xiaomiao implied in her speech that "a Chinese-speaking environment is the best tool and carrier for training artificial intelligence."

Zhou Zhi's hope was the same; he even hoped that everyone would ignore this point and only look back on today ten or twenty years later—so this is how they overtook others step by step!

Once all these matters were settled, Zhou Zhi finally had some time to himself. He took Mai Xiaomiao, Yan Zhenwei who had been waiting for a long time, and Master Ma, who had finally returned from the museum's opening, and flew to Hangzhou. (End of Chapter)