Translator: Dreamscribe
Bzzt-
Theo glanced at his phone. Then, with an utterly nonchalant expression, he deleted the message.
The sender was "Renaissance Technologies."
A legendary Wall Street quantitative fund (Quantitative Fund * a fund that makes investment decisions based on mathematical algorithms) staffed entirely by mathematicians.
"What's gotten into everyone lately."
He muttered under his breath, low enough not to be overheard. Lately, headhunters had been reaching out at an unrelenting pace.
Click.
[Invitation to Join Yale University Mathematics Department as Researcher]
[Regarding the Google DeepMind Senior Researcher Offer]
[Clay Mathematics Institute Fellowship: Notice of Final Selection]
[Regarding Recruitment for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) Cryptanalysis Division]
His inbox was packed with offers.
'Settling for the next best thing, huh?'
Theo let out a small chuckle.
What they truly wanted was, almost certainly, Seo-ha. But Seo-ha was an extraordinarily difficult target to approach.
At just sixteen years old, no matter how thoroughly he had shaken the world with his genius, he couldn't legally sign contracts on his own. On top of that, the school's fierce protective measures were shielding him.
Regulations for the protection of minors, contract guidelines personally drafted by the head of the legal team, mandatory pre-approval for any outsider attempting to contact Seo-ha. Every proposal sent to Seo-ha was double-checked.
And so, the detour they had chosen was Theo.
A fellow American team member with high academic credibility, legally capable of signing contracts, and, most importantly, close to Seo-ha.
"So they want to use me as bait."
Theo clicked the delete button with a bitter expression.
'You don't know Seo-ha's true value.'
What they wanted was functionality.
Genius as a tool for reading stock market patterns, or for maximizing the efficiency of artificial intelligence. Perhaps even MIT itself was paying more attention to the economic value Seo-ha would generate.
Scratch scratch.
Theo turned his head toward the sound of chalk.
It was the regular team meeting, and Seo-ha was standing in front of the blackboard. With his hoodie pulled up over his head, he was staring intensely at an equation.
"Theo, that's a remarkably unconventional approach. I thought you'd pull it off, but it's beyond what I expected."
Seo-ha nodded, sounding genuinely impressed.
'That's only because you're here. Even if I don't have the ability to realize it myself, I trust that you'll somehow make it happen as long as I have the concept.'
Theo gave a wry smile.
A way to reduce computational load while maintaining accuracy.
Seo-ha's request was a mathematical contradiction in itself.
Precision and speed were like a seesaw. A zero-sum game in which raising one side necessarily lowered the other.
It was the equivalent of being told to directly defy one of the absolute laws of signal processing: the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem (Nyquist–Shannon Sampling Theorem * the theory that converting analog to digital without loss requires at least double the samples).
But Theo did not complain. Making the impossible possible was what it meant to be a great mathematician.
What if Seo-ha were the one wrestling with this problem? Theo thought he'd probably crack it, as if by magic, before long.
'No, he might already know the answer.'
Theo plugged every applicable theory into this problem.
Fluid dynamics, cellular automata, chaos theory, game theory, the Poincaré-Hopf theorem, Hamiltonian mechanics. But none of them could produce the answer he was looking for.
It meant an entirely new theory was needed, and Theo wasn't sure he had it in him.
'What if I'm just second-rate?'
Reasonably talented, but never capable of making a name for himself on his own. The kind of middling mathematician who merely evaluates the theories others have built and adds footnotes.
The room was littered with crumpled paper.
Equations he had spent the past few weeks writing, then tearing up, over and over.
Then one day, as this frustrating stalemate dragged on, while he was organizing the photos he had taken over the past months, a hypothesis suddenly flashed through Theo's mind.
On the monitor was a photo he had taken the day he first arrived at MIT. It was the derivation of Smale's Problems that Seo-ha had written out. A high-resolution, 45-megapixel file, a massive chunk of data so enormous that zooming in revealed even the dust clinging to the blackboard.
And yet, even if this image were converted to one-twentieth its size, the meaning it conveyed wouldn't change.
'Discard 95% of the pixels, and information loss is zero.'
In that moment, an idea struck him like lightning.
'Why had I been trying to treat all data as equal?'
Theo hurriedly flipped open his notebook. Before the idea could evaporate, he had to commit it to the page. What he wrote down was short and simple.
'Information is not equal.'
The sky is empty, practically 100 percent void.
And yet, thanks to a handful of points dotted across it, people had been able to find their way even at sea.
"...."
He had the hypothesis, but proving it was another matter entirely. No matter how long he thought about it, this wasn't his field of expertise. Theo decided, without hesitation, to bring it to the team for discussion.
And just as he had expected, Seo-ha solved it in an instant.
After hearing the concept, Seo-ha thought for a while, then began writing equations on the blackboard.
"Theo's hypothesis is really fascinating. If the signal we're trying to observe has Sparsity, we can drastically reduce the computational load. It means that with just a tiny number of samples, a handful picked at random, we can perfectly reconstruct the whole thing."
Seo-ha picked up a piece of chalk and began filling in the empty part of the board with equations.
Scratch scratch.
In the silence, the brisk sound of chalk rang out.
Theo, Sri, and Su-jeong held their breath and watched the process unfold. Beneath Seo-ha's fingertips, the hypothesis Theo had only vaguely conceived was taking on mathematical substance.
Sri tilted his head, unconvinced.
"Is that mathematically guaranteed? To me, it just looks like a rough guess...."
Seo-ha pointed to one side of the blackboard.
"You're right, it is a guess. A guess with an extremely high probability, where the margin of error converges almost to zero.
The way a typical algorithm processes data is similar to how we play twenty questions. We ask all twenty questions from start to finish, and then derive the most reasonable answer."
Sri nodded. That was the traditional Nyquist theorem he had learned: sampling the whole thing.
"But what if we started off already knowing that the answer is a fruit, or the name of a profession?
We can change the questions. And with just two or three questions, we can find the answer. It lets us efficiently eliminate the tens of thousands of other possibilities."
Seo-ha gave Theo a thumbs-up.
"Let's name this algorithm after Theo. It was a stroke of genius. It'll be applicable to every field that handles data.
Theo's theory will soon become the industry standard."
His intuition was being made real through Seo-ha's logic. Theo felt a swell of emotion rising in his chest.
'I'm not some second-rater.'
In Seo-ha's eyes, he could see the trust being placed in him. Theo suddenly remembered the emails he had deleted earlier.
'Wall Street? NSA? The Clay Institute? Don't make me laugh.'
This kind of thrill, this kind of joy, could never be found anywhere else.
"No, if you hadn't proven it, it would have ended as nothing more than a fantasy."
Theo, still somewhat dazed, tried to turn the credit back to Seo-ha. But Seo-ha stubbornly shook his head.
"No way. This is yours, Theo. How about 'Langford Compression', something like that? Make sure to publish it as a paper later."
But Theo too felt that putting his name alone on it wouldn't be honest.
And so, taking the initials of both of their names, "ST Compression" was born into the world.
* * *
Whirrrr-
The Core's cooling fans were screaming. The Apex team members watched with tense faces.
Sri spoke in a trembling voice.
"Compression algorithm applied. Data density reduced to 5 percent."
The graph on the screen was fluctuating wildly.
It was a load that, under normal circumstances, would have triggered the warning lights and brought the system down. But the data stream with ST Compression applied was passing through the system without any resistance whatsoever.
"Losslessness confirmed. Information entropy preservation rate, 99.999%."
"I can't believe this actually works...."
Su-jeong exclaimed, unable to believe her eyes.
The droning roar began to die down, and the graph regained its stability. The surging flood of data had met the powerful filter that was ST Compression, and been tamed.
"Stabilization complete. Resource utilization at 12 percent."
Sri muttered, staring blankly at the monitor.
The engineers had warned Seo-ha. That even using the entirety of The Core wouldn't be enough to compute this sheer volume of data.
But the algorithm the team had devised together had dramatically boosted the system's efficiency.
The only step left was to install Daisy and run the final test.
* * *
A forty-story building on Thomas Street, New York.
At a glance, it might look like any ordinary building, but only a select few in New York know its true identity.
Because of its bizarre, windowless exterior, this building had long been the subject of every kind of rumor.
"Oh! That place? It was built during the Cold War, obviously. It's a secret bunker for intercepting communications."
"I heard it was the NSA's New York branch."
"Isn't it some kind of weapons lab? They say compasses go haywire anywhere near it."
These, at least, could be called reasonable suspicions. They were at least within the realm of reality.
Headquarters of the Men in Black, nest of vampires, a humanity-preservation facility built for the end of the world: there was no shortage of people pushing the wildest conspiracy theories.
But the truth is always a letdown.
This place was the telecommunications hub of AT&T, America's largest telecom company.
A fortress-like structure designed during the Cold War to withstand even nuclear war, equipped with thick concrete walls, an independent power generation system, and air purification systems to defend against biochemical terrorism. The beating heart through which every communications network in New York converged.
So Oracle being placed here was, in a sense, the natural next step.
On the twenty-ninth floor underground,
there was a zone into which not only the general public but even staff members were forbidden to enter.
Whirrrr-
The elevator came to a halt with a dull thud.
-Please provide your security clearance.
John held his eye up to the camera.
-John Carson, identity confirmed. Clearance Level 2.
As the door opened, a cool stream of air flowed out. Server racks stretched endlessly down both sides of the corridor, casting off a blue LED glow.
It was a computing cluster built at astronomical expense.
As he stepped inside, a central control room enclosed by a vast glass wall came into view. In front of the enormous multi-screen that filled the wall stood the power players who ran New York.
"Mr. Mayor, you're here."
The man at the center greeted him.
The others in attendance were the commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, the police commissioner, the Speaker of the City Council, and key legislators from both parties.
And at the very back of the control room, in front of the main console, Seo-ha was seated. He rose from his chair and approached along with his teammates.
"Hello, Mr. Mayor."
"Good to see you. You have no idea how long I've been waiting for today."
Today was the day of Oracle's demonstration.
For the past several weeks, Seo-ha and Team Apex had been staying here, refining Oracle's setup. And now, finally, every preparation was in place.
"You won't be disappointed."
Seo-ha smiled with an expression full of confidence.
John looked around the room and nodded.
"Alright! Show us, then. Show us that the taxes of New York's citizens haven't been spent in vain."
Seo-ha nodded and sat down at the main console.
"Oracle, bring the system online."
-Understood, Master.
Wurrrrr-
Together with the whir of the servers, the enormous screens covering the walls all switched on at once.
Flash!
The moment the screens lit up, gasps of wonder broke out across the room.
The entirety of New York City rose up on the display, rendered in 3D like an exquisitely crafted miniature.
John stared at the sight, at a loss for words.
Equations and graphs, a city map updating in real time, were layered one atop another to form a massive panorama. Traffic flow across New York, power consumption, communications traffic, and, based on all of it, even pedestrian data.
Within this space, New York was breathing like a single living organism.
"Incredible."
"You're telling us this really processes with zero latency?"
"Magnificent. Truly splendid."
Every gaze turned to Seo-ha, demanding an explanation.
"This is the Digital Twin. Another New York, built entirely out of data."
They had heard about it in words, but none of them had imagined the system would be this vast, this intricate.
A man with the bearing of a former military officer turned to Seo-ha and asked.
"I was told Oracle is a prediction-based system."
"Yes, that's correct."
"Just how accurately can it see the future?"
"It can't actually see the future, but...."
Seo-ha trailed off slightly and touched the screen.
"Three minutes from now, it says there's a 67 percent chance of an accident occurring at this location."
At Seo-ha's words, everyone was stunned.
"That's impossible!"
"You can really predict something like that?"
"Enough!"
John raised his hand, and the control room fell silent.
"Seo-ha, is there a chance it could be a fatal accident?"
"It's saying the probability leans toward a minor accident."
Seo-ha answered, his eyes on the screen.
"Then let's watch and see. But what's the basis for saying an accident will occur?"
"Oracle? Explain for them."
-A change in the bus route, a deviation in signal cycle timing, the driving tendencies of nearby drivers, and the delayed reaction time of one particular driver. That driver is currently likely to be in a state of diminished mental and physical capacity.
The monitor screen zoomed in rapidly to the intersection of Manhattan's 7th Avenue and 34th Street.
On a road tangled with countless vehicles, one blue sedan was highlighted in red.
-Target vehicle: unstable driving pattern. Lane departures, three per minute. Reaction speed, 58% slower than the average driver.
Oracle's dry voice echoed through the control room.
Gulp.
The sound of someone swallowing nervously was audible.
Dozens of legislators and senior officials fixed their eyes on the screen, holding their breath.
-Thirty seconds to impact.
The police commissioner, arms folded, furrowed his brow.
"Hmm. You're saying that car is just going to shoot out of nowhere?"
-Fifty meters ahead, City Bus 142 is changing into the right-hand lane to pull into a bus stop. The driver of the sedan is currently in its blind spot.
As Oracle spoke, the bus on the screen switched lanes.
At that very moment, the taxi ahead of the sedan accelerated, as if refusing to yield.
Vroom!
But in the end, forced by the bus driver who had already begun his turn, the taxi slammed on its brakes.
Crash!
The scene played out vividly on the screen: the blue sedan plowed into the rear of the vehicle ahead.
The cars following behind jerked to an emergency stop, and in an instant, the road was thrown into chaos.
"...."
"My God."
"Oh, heavens."
Silence.
A chilling, skin-crawling silence settled over the room.
What broke the silence was the radio at the police commissioner's hip.
Chk.
Chk-chk.
-This is 7th Avenue Patrol. A rear-end collision has occurred at the 34th Street intersection. A contact accident between a taxi and a passenger vehicle. Fortunately, no casualties, but traffic flow is being obstructed. Requesting backup.
*****
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