Translator: Dreamscribe
Team Apex had publicly declared the Riemann Hypothesis as their next challenge.
But the team wasn't in a position comfortable enough to devote themselves solely to that.
"Seo-ha! We got approval to use 'The Core'!"
Sri came bursting into the lab, out of breath.
On the tablet in his hand was an email from the operations committee.
"Was it really this easy?"
Su-jeong's eyes went round.
Theo shook his head.
"How could it be? It's because of everything we've done up to now. We're getting special treatment."
The Core wasn't a facility just anyone could use.
Getting a single account issued alone took dozens of documents.
Research purpose, research plan, data import and export pathways, legal review, security training, and before final approval, an ethics review and a vote by the operations committee.
"So now we can actually build the Oracle we've only been imagining."
Seo-ha got up from his seat and brought over a box he'd stored in the storage room. It was a document that laid out the basic concepts of the Oracle algorithm.
A design so computationally complex it couldn't even be attempted on a regular workstation.
"The day I actually get to use it is finally here.... I'm getting nervous."
Sri rubbed his palms together in anticipation.
"Sri, you especially need to be careful. One wrong keystroke and you could end up getting called in somewhere."
A supercomputer was on a completely different level from a regular workstation.
Killing a queued job wasn't simple, and it wasn't uncommon for a single badly written piece of code to waste thousands of cores for hours on end.
That's why researchers using The Core made it standard practice to not just double-check but triple-check before hitting enter.
"Should we take a look at this together today?"
Thud-
Seo-ha set the box down on the desk.
Inside were equations and diagrams, along with densely handwritten notes. It was less code than a blueprint closer to a thought experiment.
"This is everything?"
Su-jeong, whose eyes had been unfocused for a moment, quickly snapped to attention and came closer.
Seo-ha looked at her with warm eyes.
The team members traded opinions late into the night, putting flesh on the skeleton of the algorithm Seo-ha had created.
It was a system complex and intricate beyond measure, but for some reason Su-jeong didn't find it difficult. The reason was nothing other than this.
'At least this has a set answer.'
For days, she could barely eat a thing.
She tied her hair back tightly and threw herself into the design of the algorithm.
* * *
"Welcome."
Mayor John had come to visit the MIT campus.
Seo-ha, in a white coat, came all the way out to the door to greet him. His face had grown noticeably haggard, as if to show how far from smooth the process of pushing Oracle through the council had been.
"Good to see you again, Seo-ha."
John extended his hand with a bright expression.
"Things rough lately?"
At Seo-ha's question, John gave a wry smile.
Now that the bill had passed the council, citizens were expecting traffic to improve any day now. But as they say, out of the frying pan and into the fire, and negotiations were still going through growing pains.
"Legal keeps putting the brakes on us.
How will the data be used, who takes responsibility, who can be sued if there's an accident.... They want answers on all of it right away."
Seo-ha nodded. It was all a reaction he'd anticipated.
Beep-
As the door opened, the full view of the lab came into sight.
The researchers who had been dispatched from New York had all returned here a few days earlier.
Dozens of people were moving busily back and forth, handling their assigned work.
A researcher running with a laptop tucked under his arm, mathematicians writing something at the whiteboard, engineers gathered in threes and fours in heated debate over data processing methods.
John looked around the lab with interested eyes.
As soon as the budget bill had passed, he had prioritized pouring personnel and funding into this place.
"People probably have the wrong idea. They must picture a massive AI machine running in secret deep beneath New York City Hall.
In reality, Oracle is being made in a place like this."
"You mean like in Minority Report? If I get the chance, I'd love to experience it firsthand."
Seo-ha laughed in a cheerful voice, as if the very thought amused him.
In truth, of the 10 billion dollar budget, only about 20% would go toward equipment and infrastructure. The largest share of the budget would be spent refining and integrating data.
"But everyone looks incredibly busy."
"Right now, this place is data hell."
Seo-ha walked over to a nearby desktop and showed him the screen.
A megacity like New York was already split into thousands of systems.
Traffic department signal systems, subway operations, police and fire dispatch systems, emergency medical call centers, road maintenance, energy management, public housing administration....
Countless streams of data were being transmitted here. The problem was that all of these were systems built at different times, by different entities, each with their own independent language and standards.
"Hold on! Daylight saving time isn't applied to this data. It's all shifted by an hour!"
"The standard for emergency dispatch 'delays' is different. For hospitals it's one minute, but NYPD counts it from three minutes."
"Legal said we absolutely can't use this data. Said there's a risk of personal identification."
Loud voices rang out from every direction.
Faced with a reality completely different from what he'd seen on paper, John briefly wore a stunned expression.
"I had no idea it would be this chaotic."
Refining the data of a megacity like New York demanded enormous budgets and time, and most critically, the effort of a great many highly skilled personnel.
They checked data consistency and removed errors and duplicates. They also communicated with the officials in charge to fill in missing information and unified spatial and temporal standards. And throughout all of this, any personal information that could become an issue had to be de-identified.
"We're still in the beginning stages."
Seo-ha guided him to the deepest part of the lab.
Security was growing steadily tighter.
The access card levels kept stepping up one by one, and at the end they had to pass through fingerprint recognition and an iris scan.
Beep-
"Welcome. This is 'The Core', where Oracle's brain is being built."
When the door opened, the air changed.
Unlike the commotion outside, an indescribable tension hung in the air here.
"Ohh!"
John looked around with an awestruck expression.
Along one wall stood rows of servers taller than a person.
Cold air pouring from the cooling units, status indicator lights blinking in regular rhythm, this was MIT's pride, its high-performance computing cluster.
Tens of thousands of CPU cores, large-scale GPU nodes, and even an ultra-high-speed interconnect system, which was rare equipment for a university research lab.
It wasn't a national-grade supercomputer (ORNL, LLNL), but for research purposes it ranked among the very best in the world.
"Dean Whitman went through quite a lot of trouble to get us access to this. Of course, the budget came from the city of New York."
John walked along the server racks, unable to hold back his admiration.
"A scale like this.... Designing this in New York would've been impossible anyway.
Honestly, letters insisting Oracle is realistically impossible pour into city hall every single day. But seeing this, I'm convinced we can pull it off."
"Would you like me to put you a little more at ease?"
Seo-ha led him over to a large monitor in the center.
Logs were streaming across the screen in real time.
"The truth is, we've already started testing."
"Is that really true?"
John's eyes widened.
Sri sat at the keyboard. Next to him, Su-jeong and Theo each had their laptops open, watching the monitor intently.
"What we're running right now is the first module of the Oracle algorithm. The pattern recognition engine."
Seo-ha pointed at the screen with his hand.
"When we were building the satellite AI before, we refined the traffic data in advance. We trained it on ten years' worth data."
"Ten years? How long did it take?"
"On a regular workstation, it would take well over a year. The Core did it in 48 hours."
"Incredible."
John suddenly looked around, as if something had struck him.
"But is this all the people you have? There are only four of you."
For designing the core brain of a 10 billion dollar project, it was far too few.
Seo-ha made a playful expression as he looked at John.
"Our team is an elite few.
Mathematics is a discipline where one outstanding person can produce higher efficiency than a hundred people who are slightly less skilled. You could think of it as a structural feature of the field of mathematics itself."
Seo-ha nodded at Su-jeong.
Su-jeong got up from her seat and walked over to the whiteboard. On it was drawn a massive and complex diagram.
"Hello, Mayor. I'm Lim Su-jeong, the mathematician at Team Apex primarily handling number theory. I'll give you a brief overview."
John nodded with an interested look.
"Oracle is made up of a total of seven layers. The pattern recognition we're running now is only stage one."
Su-jeong explained, pointing to each layer.
"Stage two is causal inference, stage three is external variable integration, stage four is simulation, stage five is optimization algorithms, stage six is uncertainty quantification.
And the final, stage seven, is...."
When Su-jeong trailed off, John looked toward Seo-ha. Seo-ha finished Su-jeong's line.
"The decision-making system.
The output of each stage becomes the input of the next, and the result that emerges after passing through all seven stages becomes Oracle's 'prediction'."
"So that's where the Digital Twin comes in, at stage four."
Seo-ha nodded.
"We've still got a long way to go before we get there."
Sri, who had been sitting in his seat, suddenly shot to his feet.
"Seo-ha! The stage one test just finished!"
Curious about the results, everyone rushed over to the monitor.
From behind, John watched them with a satisfied look on his face.
* * *
"Su-jeong noona, about the math model for stage two causal inference."
The work continued even after John had left.
The four of them gathered in the meeting room to carry on with discussions for the next stage.
"The patterns have been captured, so I think we've got enough statistical correlation secured. Now I think it's your turn to shine, noona."
Su-jeong swallowed hard.
'At what point and under what conditions does the system undergo a qualitative change?'
For this, Seo-ha had decided to adopt a modeling approach using integer constraints and step-function structures.
Integer constraints always made calculations difficult.
Problems that could be handled with differentiation and approximation in continuous models all exploded the moment they were converted to integers.
At the scale of a city-wide system, the difficulty rose exponentially.
"Yeah, got it. I'll have it ready by the next meeting."
Su-jeong nodded.
After the meeting ended, Sri and Su-jeong left. Theo was about to leave when he seemed to hesitate for a moment, then came over to Seo-ha and spoke.
"Seo-ha. Su-jeong's been looking pretty worn out lately. Are you doing this on purpose, by any chance?"
Anyone could see Su-jeong was pushing herself too hard. Seo-ha gave an awkward smile and nodded.
"...."
Seo-ha started to say something, stopped, and made a troubled face.
"What? What were you going to say?"
"...Noona is right in the middle of an explosive period of growth."
Theo had been sensing it too.
The most important moment for a mathematician,
When a mathematician faces a problem that surpasses their own limits, that's when they grow. And sometimes fall apart at the same time.
"Will she really be all right?"
Theo had known that too, which was why he'd given Su-jeong those problems before.
But what Seo-ha was asking of her now was on a level far beyond that.
"Now, this is a secret."
Seo-ha sidled closer and spoke in a low voice.
"Su-jeong noona is incredibly strong in the face of adversity. Though she doesn't seem to think so herself."
From the very first time they'd met, Su-jeong had never been the type to run away from a problem.
"So shh!"
Seo-ha walked away.
Left alone, Theo looked up at the ceiling and muttered with a dazed expression.
"...Don't tell me Sri and I are going to go through the same thing?"
The room temperature was fine, but a strange chill seemed to creep over him, as if a cold had set into his body.
*****
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