100: Chapter 100 Bottleneck

The rhythm of the laboratory seemed to have entered a bottleneck period.

Li Wei sat in front of the sterile workstation, her brows furrowed as she stared at the various cell samples in the petri dishes under the microscope.

On the progress board in front of her, the marker representing the new multipolar artificial neuron material had not moved forward for a long time.

It was as if the smooth sailing of the early stages had exhausted all their luck.

Based on the plan optimized by enlightenment, combined with her solid experimental skills, she had indeed successfully induced and purified basic neural conduction materials with excellent performance.

This in itself was already at the very forefront of the relevant global fields.

But that was precisely where the problem lay.

There was no road ahead.

enlightenment possessed powerful information processing and deduction engines, as well as the ability to think and express, but it was not an omniscient or omnipotent deity.

It required real-world data as fuel and signposts.

When the existing human knowledge graph reached its boundaries, and when the experimental data itself needed to be created from scratch, enlightenment could not point out the precise coordinates of the treasure out of thin air.

It was more like a super analyzer that could help you find the most likely direction from countless messy data points, but to successfully find the desired material, the Researchers still had to experiment themselves, over and over again.

What Li Wei was doing now was the most clumsy and helpless of tasks.

Exhaustive exploration.

She tried changing the component ratios of the culture medium, introducing different induction factors, adjusting the wavelength and time of UV curing, and even tried co-culturing different engineered bacterial strains.

Every combination meant a massive amount of repetitive operations and long periods of waiting and observation.

The result?

The cultured materials either had extremely low conduction efficiency, poor biocompatibility, or simply failed to form stably.

Occasionally, a few samples seemed promising, but they quickly revealed defects in subsequent electrophysiological tests.

They were unable to achieve bidirectional conduction, suffered from severe signal attenuation, or could only respond to specific types of stimuli.

"Sigh..."

Li Wei sighed, took off her goggles, and rubbed her sore eyes.

Her notebook was densely packed with failed attempts and parameter combinations waiting to be verified.

"How's it going? Li Wei, any leads yet?"

Wang Zhe's voice came from nearby.

He had just finished his own experiment, with a hint of relief on his face, but more so, anxiety about the overall progress.

The same material route he was responsible for had just completed basic performance testing today, finally reaching the level Li Wei's group had achieved several days ago.

This meant he was also about to step into the no-man's-land where Li Wei currently was.

Li Wei didn't even look up; she just shook her head in disappointment, her fingers unconsciously tapping the lab bench.

"Nothing. I've tried over a dozen new plans, and everything that comes out is useless. It feels like I'm just relying on luck.

Now all I can do is keep working, record all the failure data, and send it over to the Starfire Research Institute. Hopefully, they can narrow down the range and deduce a more likely path."

Hearing this, Wang Zhe made an exaggerated 'we're doomed' gesture, his shoulders slumping.

"No way? Even you're stuck? Does that mean we all have to push forward using this exhaustive method?

This efficiency... this budget..."

He looked around at the busy but visibly anxious Researchers in the lab.

"I really don't know if the funding is enough for us to squander like this. This isn't just burning money; it's practically filling a bottomless pit."

Li Wei gave a bitter smile, recalling her optimism when she had reported to Chen Youhua earlier.

"I even guaranteed Youhua back then that we'd have a breakthrough in a month or two.

Thinking back now, I was truly naive. This isn't a problem of time at all; it's a problem of direction.

It's pitch black ahead, so confusing."

"Alright, don't blame yourself too much. This was never a task that could be completed step-by-step."

Wang Zhe patted her shoulder to comfort her.

"You keep busy. I'll go over to Sun Qian's side and check; she seems to be stuck as well."

Wang Zhe walked to the area at the other end of the laboratory.

Sun Qian was facing a microscope with a focused expression, but a lingering haze of gloom also clouded her brow.

She and Wang Zhe were on the same route, but her focus was more on bionic structures; however, she had also fallen into the deep-water zone.

"Sun Qian, how's the progress?" Wang Zhe asked softly.

Sun Qian looked up, tiredly rubbed the space between her eyebrows, and let out a long breath, her tone filled with frustration.

"Wang Zhe, don't even mention it. It's the same old story.

The material we've produced can barely act as a unidirectional transmitter, converting electrical signals into weak chemical signals to stimulate motor neurons and make a frog's leg twitch.

But what use is that?"

She pointed to the experimental records nearby.

"What about receiving signals? Our material doesn't react at all to the complex chemical information transmitted by sensory neurons! Let alone converting it back into electrical signals!"

She picked up a slender, filamentary material with a special luster from a petri dish and shook it self-mockingly.

"To put it bluntly, at this stage, what's the difference between this thing and an exceptionally thin, precise wire?

Using an electric stimulator directly on the nerve would be faster and more direct!

We've put in all this effort to culture, induce, and purify, just to replace a wire?

This is a hundred thousand miles away from the perfect artificial neuron Chen Youhua requested!"

Sun Qian's predicament was very specific.

How could this artificial material be endowed with the ability to perceive and translate biological neural signals?

It was like asking a stone to understand the language of birds and respond; the core signal conversion mechanism was the biggest obstacle at present.

Looking at the stack of experimental reports on Sun Qian's desk and the similarly stagnant progress bar on the recording board next to it, Wang Zhe could only nod helplessly.

"I understand. Li Wei's side is about the same, stuck on bidirectional and multipolar features.

It seems everyone is back at the same starting line.

Or more accurately, we're all feeling for stones while crossing the river."

He looked around the entire laboratory.

Researchers from various groups were all buried in operating instruments, recording data, and analyzing results.

The atmosphere was dull and oppressive, lacking the excitement and efficiency of the early stages, replaced by a sense of confusion and mechanical repetition.

Everyone was using their own methods to find a path.

Trying different formulas, different processes, and different test conditions.

Every attempt, whether successful or not, generated a massive amount of data.

This data would be carefully recorded, organized, and then transmitted to the Information Institute to be merged into enlightenment's vast database.

enlightenment was like a super pathfinding staff officer sitting in the rear; it couldn't directly tell you where the treasure was.

But it could take the continuous stream of reports from the front—this path is blocked, there's a deep pit here, a weak signal is suspected there—

And combine them with all known knowledge graphs to perform complex probability deductions and path planning.

This was destined to be a long, tedious, and costly process.

There was no sudden flash of insight, only countless attempts, failures, analyses, and re-attempts.

Every Researcher was using the most basic scientific methods to expand the boundaries of human cognition, bit by bit.