For 30 advance/early chapters : p atreon.com/AutumnXd
The interview wrapped up successfully, amid Erik's faintly awkward mood. The two of them were escorted out of the radar station, while Ryan walked slowly back to his dorm.
Back in his room, he held a video conference with Mason's team.
Those people had received a large bonus before the new year. Every single person at the research center had gotten a bonus of at least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and with their regular salaries on top, even the lowest earner among them cleared three hundred thousand for the year.
They'd gone home happily with their money, and after the holiday they'd come back happily to work at the prosthetics research center. A few of their juniors who'd worked on the myoelectric prosthetic research with them were still finishing their degrees in college. When those students heard about this year's income, they were consumed with envy and regret, cursing themselves for not having started school a year or two earlier.
On the video call, Mason's team first congratulated Ryan on becoming Crimson Typhoon's chief designer, then launched into their work report.
After the Triton-1 launch, they'd already split off a portion of their personnel to research lower-limb prosthetic structures. The progress was reasonably good.
"Lower-limb prosthetics can roughly be divided into above-knee and below-knee. What we're currently researching is the above-knee prosthetic," Mason said.
"Right now we're studying other advanced approaches from around the world while developing our own concepts. But in areas like the operating system and the damper design, there are still quite a few problems to solve."
"And we're severely short on personnel, so we're considering recruitment."
Ryan said, "For personnel, just go through the company. As for the operating system, this time you'll write it entirely yourselves. I won't step in to help. The damper design, though, you can leave to me."
Mason naturally wasn't going to refuse. "Understood. We'll keep working hard on the operating system."
As he spoke, he glanced at the colleagues responsible for writing the operating system. They made a fists-up "let's go" gesture in response.
If Ryan had to solve every problem for them, weren't they just collecting salaries and bonuses for nothing?
Next, Ryan confirmed the performance requirements for the above-knee prosthetic once more.
The requirements for the above-knee prosthetic were on the same tier as the requirements during Triton-1's development.
Which was to say, at minimum it had to let the wearer walk with a gait indistinguishable from an ordinary person's, adapt to various terrain like stairs and uneven ground, and satisfy the wearer's jogging needs. The exterior also had to be attractive and proportionate, consistent with the shape of a human leg.
To meet those requirements, beyond the exterior design, the prosthetic's dampers had to be powerful enough.
A damper's purpose was to absorb energy and dampen shock, providing resistance to motion and dissipating the energy generated when an object moved.
In this area, after researching Crimson Typhoon's shock-absorption system, Ryan had already maxed out the damper branch of the technology tree.
For a lower-limb prosthetic, the damper design was one of the key factors affecting the wearer's experience. When a person walked, the peak force on the foot was about one and a half times body weight. Jogging brought it to two and a half times, and sprinting could push it close to three times. Under forces that large, if the damper couldn't absorb energy and dampen shock promptly and effectively, the prosthetic's wearer wouldn't even be able to walk steadily. They'd be better off with a cane in hand.
Damper design was child's play for Ryan now. He'd taken this task on mainly with an eye toward the brain-controlled exoskeleton he'd eventually be developing for Aaron Holt.
An exoskeleton needed dampers too. When the time came, the dampers he used on the lower-limb prosthetic would only need slight modifications to be transplanted onto the exoskeleton. No need to redesign from scratch, which would be much more convenient.
He didn't know yet when that project would begin, but there was no harm in getting the doable preparations done in advance.
With the video conference over, Ryan turned back to his computer, where the artificial intelligence was in the middle of training.
This AI, beyond using its algorithm for image learning, was also undergoing natural-language training.
Natural-language processing was an important direction in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence. It studied the various theories and methods for enabling effective communication between humans and computers using natural language.
Put simply, it was about getting an AI to speak human language and understand human language, so it could do human work for humans.
The page on the computer was still the simple interface Patricia had seen, but the upload icon beside the search box was gone.
"Hello."
Ryan typed it into the search box and pressed Enter to send. The page instantly expanded into a chat interface.
"Hello," the artificial intelligence replied.
Ryan rubbed his chin and quickly tapped out a sentence on the keyboard. "I'd like to ask you for a favor. Please don't find it too troublesome."
"I am an artificial intelligence. I do not find things troublesome. Please go ahead."
"I want to know what a mech looks like."
"Which mech?"
"The one that can run and jump, and can also turn into a ball."
Swish.
The AI uploaded three images to the chat interface. The first was an athlete. The second was a ball. The third was a mech from an animated work, slightly bent at the knees with its arms loosely cupped, as though holding something.
Ryan covered his face and rapidly hammered the keyboard again. "Not like that. I mean a mech that combines all three of those conditions."
Swish.
In less than a second, the images on the screen changed.
In the new image, there were the athlete, the ball, and the mech all at once.
But it was obviously the relevant images from the first answer's three pictures, extracted and then assembled together into a new picture.
"..."
"No. The three conditions I gave are a single whole. They aren't separate." Ryan propped his chin on both hands and waited for the AI's response.
Soon, a new reply appeared.
Ryan took one look at it and nearly passed out.
In the new image, the same extracted figures from the three earlier pictures were still there, except their positions had changed again.
The ball had been placed in the mech's hands, so it looked like the mech was holding a basketball.
And the athlete had been placed inside the mech's cockpit. Not simply dropped into that position either. The AI had even performed a layering operation, putting the athlete's layer beneath the cockpit glass.
That way, the athlete looked like it had been sitting in the cockpit all along.
The three of them had genuinely become a single whole.
And.
Looking at this image, Ryan inexplicably felt as though a song from his previous life had started playing in his head.
He shook his head and threw the stray thoughts out of his mind.
He sighed. This artificial idiot.
No. The AI looked a little idiotic right now, but the effect of the natural-language training was very obvious.
Its interpretation of the instruction was wrong, but its potential was enormous. And this kind of error could be corrected through training.
To fulfill the request just now, it had even employed its image-processing module to perform image synthesis. This was an AI with genuine capacity for action and a degree of creativity.
Ryan could already foresee the scene once its natural-language processing training was complete and its other functional modules were loaded.
By then, it could serve as a search engine, as a personal assistant. It could even work as a photo-editing tool without any trouble. Graphic designers of the future might only need to sit at their computers and state their requirements, and the AI would make the edits.
Though, if it reached that level, the graphic-design profession probably wouldn't need to exist anymore.