52: Chapter 52 The Professor's Invitation

Wang Shuo gave Zheng Jun a resentful look. "Boss, oh Boss, wouldn't it have been better if you just pretended to forget? Now, even if I wanted to pretend, I can't..."

"I got it. You guys go back first." Wang Shuo sighed and walked back upstairs, looking miserable.

Downstairs, Zheng Jun looked bewildered and asked Li Li beside him, "Did I say something wrong?"

Teacher Ding Runan sat quietly at her desk, her gaze occasionally sweeping over the time in the bottom right corner of the screen.

It was already twelve o'clock at noon.

Doing the math, class ended at 11:30, so half an hour had already passed.

Her office was on the third floor, and the classroom was on the fourth. In half an hour, he couldn't walk down one flight of stairs?

Teacher Ding Runan's eyes turned slightly cold.

"Report."

"Come in."

Hearing that cool, detached voice, Wang Shuo felt a bit intimidated, but he was already at the door; it didn't seem like he could avoid going in.

"Teacher Ding, I'm here."

"Hmm." Teacher Ding Runan responded indifferently and then stopped speaking, focusing intently on the papers in front of her.

Wang Shuo could only wait quietly.

Ten minutes passed...

Wang Shuo glanced up, but Teacher Ding Runan still had no intention of speaking.

Twenty minutes passed...

Teacher Ding Runan remained in the same position.

Thirty minutes passed...

Teacher Ding Runan seemed to have encountered some kind of problem; her brows were slightly furrowed, as if she had forgotten that a student was still standing beside her, waiting for her to speak.

Wang Shuo quietly leaned in to look at what was in Teacher Ding Runan's hands, and his eyes widened immediately. This was...

A blank sheet of A4 paper...

"Couldn't hold it in anymore?" A cold, clear voice came from her.

Wang Shuo turned to look and saw that Teacher Ding Runan had turned her head at some point, looking at him with a half-smile, her expression quite intriguing.

"Uh... Teacher, I..."

"If I recall correctly, Student Wang Shuo, you seem to still owe me something?"

Owe her something? Wang Shuo looked up, a bit dazed, and thought for a moment... It seemed... he didn't owe her anything, right?

"Our Student Wang Shuo truly has a forgetful nature." Teacher Ding Runan's face quickly turned cold. She placed the blank sheet of paper onto the desk, tapped it lightly, and said indifferently, "Write."

"Write what?"

"Decide what to write yourself; I only look at the results."

Seeing that Wang Shuo was still hesitant, Teacher Ding Runan said coldly, "What, Student Wang Shuo, have you already forgotten the big talk you made? Or is it that... the so-called circular neural network you mentioned was fake from the start?"

Node-based self-looping neural network!

Wang Shuo understood instantly.

He seemed to have promised Teacher Ding Runan in front of him that he would provide her with a complete plan and some source code within three days, but because the complexity of Zero and the new coding language exceeded his imagination, he had completely thrown the matter to the back of his mind.

So this was the source of all this?

This was the reason he had waited for half an hour?

This was the source of all the unfair treatment he had received?

Wang Shuo felt incredibly wronged.

"Teacher Ding, you have to listen to my explanation..."

"There's no rush for explanations." Teacher Ding Runan leaned back in her chair and tapped the paper on the desk. "Since you've remembered, hurry up and write. You have two hours."

Write what? He had already created Zero, and it was sitting right there; how was he supposed to write it? Write another Zero?

Wang Shuo thought about it; it didn't seem impossible.

Compared to the new coding language Wang Shuo was writing, modern, common English-based code still had great limitations. Not to mention anything else, the level of conciseness alone was far beyond what English-based code could compare to. The advantage of a high-level language was that its complexity lay in places that were invisible.

Wang Shuo could already manage to use one or two lines of code in the high-level language to express logical commands that would require hundreds of lines of English-based code.

Such efficiency was simply incredible.

And the wonders of the high-level coding language went far beyond that.

If a Zero made purely of English-based code were to be born... it would probably be better than the so-called Artificial Intelligence assistants of today, but essentially, it would be no different. The new intelligence built with it would not have the infinite possibilities of the Zero built with the high-level language, and it would have higher hardware requirements. After all, although he wouldn't write spaghetti code, length, quantity, and complexity were unavoidable.

But at the computer level, being even a little bit better meant a world of difference. Wang Shuo believed that with his optimization, even if he wrote the code in English, it would still be far superior to anyone else's.

Moreover, this was the difference between having intelligence and not having it; this was the transition from 0 to 1.

"Um... Teacher Ding..."

"What is it now?" Teacher Ding Runan looked up, somewhat impatiently.

Wang Shuo pointed to the A4 paper on the desk.

"This sheet of paper isn't enough... not nearly enough."

Teacher Ding Runan was stunned once again.

In fact, ever since she first met this somewhat green-behind-the-ears young man, she had often found herself in this state of shock.

Before this, she thought she had made full preparations, but what she hadn't expected was... her preparations were far from sufficient.

So, she was stunned once again.

If the first shock was because of the wild talk from a student who didn't know the immensity of heaven and earth, then this time, it was the student himself.

The A4 paper in front of her was already stacked in a thick pile, and the green-behind-the-ears young man beside her was still writing furiously without a single moment of pause, as if all this information had been deeply imprinted in his mind.

At the beginning, she thought Wang Shuo was playing some kind of trick to try and get by, but when she picked up the A4 paper he had already written on and looked at it, she was bewildered.

Code... the whole page was full of code...

She even discovered logical instructions and functional algorithms in it that she had never seen before, and skipping past those, she realized... she couldn't understand it.

A master's graduate student in computer science couldn't understand the code commands and operating logic written by a freshman student; if others heard this, they would probably laugh their heads off.

But this had already happened, right before her eyes.

"This part... I can barely understand; it should be a function to retrieve data from the database, but why write it this way?"

"This part... how does the logic of this part hold up? Wouldn't a data overflow occur and cause the algorithm to crash?"

"This part..."

Teacher Ding Runan silently flipped through page after page of A4 paper, every single one of which had been filled with code by Wang Shuo. She occasionally compared this code with the knowledge she had already learned, and she realized... she had wasted four years of graduate school.

"Whew..." A long exhale came from beside her.

Teacher Ding Runan turned to look and saw Wang Shuo put down his pen and gently flex his wrists. Beside him was a mountain of A4 paper; at a rough estimate, there were at least fifty or sixty pages.

"You... finished?"

"Ah, not yet." Wang Shuo showed a slightly awkward but polite smile. "My hand just hurts a bit, so I'm resting. It's been a long time since I used a pen to write code, so I'm a bit rusty, and there's still a lot left to write."

Rusty... Heh.

"You... already have all the architecture and the draft of the code in your head?"

Wang Shuo seemed somewhat surprised; he opened his eyes wide. "Of course. Shouldn't you have all the details worked out before you start writing? This is only a small part of the entire code. I'll take a break and then hurry up to write as much as I can."

Teacher Ding Runan felt a breath catch in her chest; she felt a bit of tightness. She took a deep breath, feeling that if she continued to talk, she would be angered to death by this junior student.

"Stop writing for now." Teacher Ding Runan tried hard to maintain a calm appearance. "I didn't call you here today to write code; there is something more important waiting for you."

"Something more important?"

"My teacher... wants to see you."