He was outscored after scoring 520 points, but his status as a prodigy can't be hidden.

Wang Lei cautiously asked from the side, "Then... how can we give it a motivation?"

Xia Zijing glanced at Lin Yu.

Lin Yu didn't say anything.

he was thinking.

Two minutes later, he sat up straight.

Give it an unsolvable problem.

Wang Lei didn't follow up: "What do you mean?"

Why are people curious? Because there are things they don't understand. Not understanding creates anxiety, and anxiety drives you to find answers. Answers bring satisfaction, and satisfaction makes you want to find even more things you don't understand.

He stood up and walked to the control panel.

"The data I fed it before all had answers. What it was doing was learning the path from questions to answers. But it never encountered a question without an answer."

"So it doesn't need to be curious. Because it knows the answer is always in the data."

Lin Yu's fingers rested on the keyboard.

"I want to give it a question. A question whose answer cannot be found in the existing data."

"Force it to think for itself."

Zhou Weiguo stood three meters away, listening to the conversation.

He didn't understand all the technical details. But he understood one thing.

What this young man needs to do is not to teach machines to calculate faster.

It is to stimulate the machine's desire for knowledge.

Zhou Weiguo worked in the military system for twenty years. He had met countless intelligent people.

But there are only two types of intelligent people that he truly fears.

One type is the person who can solve all problems.

Another type is the person who can ask the right questions.

Lin Yu is clearly the latter.

That afternoon, another message came from Shen Yue.

[Kevin's New Materials Alliance has published its first research paper. The thermal conductivity has reached 4100. It's still some distance from your 5247, but the progress is rapid. At this rate, it may catch up within three months.]

[One more thing. Someone at MIT is offering a high price on the dark web for any technical documents and personnel information related to the Tianyan instruction set. There is no upper limit to the price.]

After Lin Yu finished reading, he handed the phone to Xia Zijin.

Xia Zijing glanced at it.

"He's looking for someone from your group."

"No."

Lin Yu put his phone away. "He's looking for my route. He knows the materials are just the surface; what really caused him to lose Chicago was Tianyan's underlying logic."

"Did he guess?"

"He didn't guess the specifics. But he did guess that I had cards he couldn't see."

Lin Yu deleted the message and placed his phone face down on the table.

"Asymmetric competition".

He repeated the word Kevin had said earlier.

"He doesn't want to chase me on my track. He wants to figure out what my track looks like. Then he'll build a new one."

Xia Zijin was silent for a second.

"What about the eye of the sky?"

"The Heavenly Eye is another matter."

"Are you sure he doesn't know about the existence of the Heavenly Eye?"

Lin Yu did not answer.

He looked down at the black screen of his phone, his eyes slightly narrowed.

He wasn't sure about that either.

Meanwhile, 7,000 kilometers away in Boston, the lights in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory stayed on all night.

Kevin Sterling sat in his office, a newly intercepted summary of encrypted communications on the screen in front of him.

The communication content could not be cracked.

But he obtained both the starting point and the end point of the communication.

Starting point: China, a military research base in Beijing.

Destination: Lin Yu's Singularity Algorithm Company server.

Kevin took off his headphones and leaned back in his chair.

The corners of his mouth slowly curved into an arc.

"So you took the job from the military."

He said in a low voice.

"interesting."

The third day after Xia Zijin returned.

AI training has entered a new phase.

Lin Yu stopped feeding it any more data.

What he did was simple—he randomly removed 30 percent of the answers from the existing training set.

Then nothing was done.

Just waiting.

Wang Lei panicked on the first day.

"Boss, its accuracy is plummeting. It's dropped from 87% to 63%. Are you sure you didn't break it?"

"Wait a little longer."

The accuracy rate dropped to 41 percent the next day.

Wang Lei was about to cry.

"Boss, there are only four days left in the two-week window. Director Zhao is calling every day to urge us. If you delete the data now, the accuracy will be halved. How am I supposed to explain this?"

"Wait a little longer."

On the third day, the accuracy rate continued to drop to 35%.

Zhou Weiguo also started paying attention. Although he didn't interfere with technical decisions, he circled the entry in the operation log that involved batch deleting training data answers in red.

He didn't ask Lin Yu.

However, he added a note at the end of his log: "[The project leader has proactively reduced the AI ​​training efficiency. The reason is yet to be determined. If no reasonable explanation is provided before the end of the window period, it will be reported.]"

Xia Zijin was the only one who didn't panic.

Because she knew what Lin Yu was doing.

An AI that can always find answers in data doesn't need to think.

Only when the answer disappears will it be forced to take another path.

A road that no one has ever walked on.

"You're gambling."

She said to Lin Yu.

"I'm conducting an experiment."

"What's the difference?"

"An experiment has a hypothesis. A gamble doesn't."

Xia Zijin didn't say anything more.

She opened her behavioral analysis model and began recording the AI's reaction patterns each time it faced a question with no answer.

In the past two days, the AI's response has been consistent: it cannot find a matching answer and its output is indeterminate.

On the afternoon of the third day, things changed.

4:17 PM.

The AI ​​encountered an image with a deleted answer—a ship docked in a harbor with three people on deck. The question is: Which way will the ship go next?

The standard answer has been deleted.

The AI ​​fell silent.

It's not the silence of a system crash. It's the silence of someone who's thinking.

Previously, the response time was a fraction of a second.

This time, it stopped for a full eleven seconds.

Then it output a line of text.

[The deck crew are all facing the same direction, towards port. The bow mooring line has been retrieved, but the stern mooring line has not. Inferred heading: slightly aft port. Confidence level: 67%.]

[Note: No matching answer was found in the training data. The above conclusions are independent inferences based on observable information.]

When Wang Lei saw the last line, the can of cola in his hand fell to the ground.

Xia Zijing's fingers stopped on the keyboard.

She slowly turned her head and looked at Lin Yu.

Lin Yu stared at the screen.

He didn't laugh.

There was no excitement.

There were no extra expressions.

There was just a light in his eyes.

The light was very quiet.

Like someone who has waited a long time, finally getting what they've been waiting for.

"It provides the confidence level."

Xia Zijing's voice was very soft, "It knows it might be wrong."

"right."

"It acknowledges uncertainty."

"right."

"Then, even when it was uncertain, it still chose to give an answer."

Lin Yu's gaze never left the screen.

"That's what thinking is."

The control center was silent for a few seconds.

Zhou Weiguo stood at the back, unable to understand the words on the screen, but he could feel the atmosphere in the air.

That feeling where, in a certain instant, everyone realizes that something is different.

He experienced this feeling once in the military.

It was twenty years ago when he personally witnessed the signal from the first domestically produced satellite being transmitted back to the ground control center.