Dickinson and Mei Yiqiu talked about some interesting things about their youthful days in Princeton, and then hid in their room, not knowing what to say.

Huang Liang had no choice but to sit in the living room with Hou Biao and wait.

Most of the decoration and furniture in the house are outdated from the last century, but the computer is new, and it looks different from ordinary computers, which has a kind of sci-fi feel in a movie.

Huang Liang doesn't think there's anything wrong with this, after all, the person who can let Mei Yiqiu come to the door, even if he plays some black technology, it's normal, not to mention that it's just a computer.

He glanced at Hou Biao who was sitting next to him, and knew that this bald man was Mei Yiqiu's bodyguard, and he had never talked much, so he didn't plan to take a stubble.

He stood up bored, moved his muscles, caught a glimpse of a few magazines on the computer desk, and walked over to pick them up and flipped through them.

There are three journals, Science, Nature, and Cell, all of which are authoritative journals in the scientific community, and there is a thick Science Citation Index next to them.

Most of the articles in these magazines were difficult to understand, and to Huang Liang they were like heavenly books, so he just looked at the headlines and passed.

However, one of the articles, "The Possibility of Spontaneous Consciousness in Mechanical IoT Neural Networks", caught his attention, because the article was signed by Charlie Dickinson.

The knowledge covered in this article is relatively wide, covering almost all fields of physical and life sciences, but fortunately, it only puts forward a hypothesis, and does not use any formula to prove it. It is to the effect that when information flows in the Internet of Things, with the increase of network nodes and the number of information, the chaos of information will increase, and many information will be randomly annihilated, and corresponding new unknown information will be generated, which will cause the loss of control of information, so as to generate active consciousness outside the program.

Huang Liang knew nothing about the physics and informatics theories in it, but it did not prevent him from understanding what the article was talking about.

Huang Liang is very interested in the question of the origin of consciousness, if the fluctuation of information itself can give birth to consciousness, then is there still a lot of independent primitive consciousness in this world that human beings have not discovered and recognized? For example, a TV set, or a computer, with its use, has already produced a very primitive consciousness, but because it is too low-level, we can't see it?

For some reason, he suddenly thought of his mobile phone and quickly took it out of his pocket and took a look. THE FOLDER NAMED GHOST IS RIGHT ON THE SCREEN, LYING QUIETLY AS IF IT WERE JUST A NORMAL APP ABANDONED BY THE USER.

He remembered the time before the escape, and thought that this thing might be connected to a computer somewhere in Wuzhong, and maybe there were many computers there, forming a local area network, leading to a wide area network, and even entering the closed internal network of the prison.

In the past, he thought it was just an advanced virus program, similar to the legendary agent using encrypted communication technology, but now it is far from that simple.

Huang Liang flipped through other articles, and except for a few articles on medical breakthroughs published in Cell, most of the others had nothing to do with him and could not be understood.

He finally opened the Science Citation Index, the world's most authoritative scientific citation database, called the Science Citation Index (SCI).

Huang Liang knew this when he was a student, although his time was not yet in line with the world, but he already paid great attention to international influence in academics. Generally, science doctoral graduates are required to publish at least one SCI paper, and now some schools have required more than two. Whether or not a paper is included in SCI is the most important or even the only evaluation criterion for unit ranking and project evaluation in all scientific research fields.

But now it's all cloud databases, and only these old scientists will buy paper indexed literature and put it at home, what use can it be in addition to collecting?

Huang Liang shook his head, closed the book, and turned on his phone. He was going to use a search engine to find Dickinson's paper, but when he saw GHOST on his phone's desktop, he opened it and typed a line of text into it:

Help me find Charlie Dickinson's paper at SCI.

He wasn't sure if he would get a response, but he just wanted to give it a try. In the past, he had always used GHOST as a special way to connect with Aoki, but Aoki hadn't been in touch for a long time.

After typing on his phone, he sat back on the sofa, took a sip of tea, and found that the tea was already cold.

He saw Hou Biao still sitting there motionless, like a sculpture. He remembered the professor's beautiful assistant, and if he had been here, the atmosphere would have been much more harmonious. But I don't know why, Mei Ziqing, who has always been inseparable from the professor, didn't come.

Just when Huang Liang was bored, the phone vibrated a little.

There is one more message in GHOST. He opened it and saw a long list of paper titles, as well as the date of publication and the name of the journal—

The Fluctuation of Information Entropy and the Generation of Consciousness

The Relationship between the Dividing Line of Infant Intelligence and the Input of Information

The Non-Equivalence Relationship between Intelligence and Logical Thinking

Misunderstandings of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Algorithms

……

Dickinson's research field is very broad, but the direction is still clear, mainly focused on the intersection of informatics and life sciences, and as can be seen from the titles of some articles, he has unique insights into the generation of consciousness.

Huang Liang originally planned to ask GHOST to send a few more specific papers to read, but it must not be a pleasant experience to think about reading the pictures of the papers on such a small screen, or difficult articles that he didn't know much about.

The screen of this phone is not large, and the style is old. Originally, he was going to change it a long time ago, and the organization had bought him the latest mobile phone, but because of Aoki and GHOST, he still insisted on using this one.

He dismissed the idea of asking GHOST to pass on the paper, but when he finally got a response from GHOST, he wanted to say something more, as if he had met an old friend.

Inside, he asked: Where did Aoki go?

After about two seconds, GHOST had a response: the South Pacific.

Huang Liang asked: Can you contact him?

GHOST answers: No, I've been missing for a year.

Huang Liang was taken aback. He also had a premonition that something was wrong with Aoki, and he also found some special channels to investigate, of course, he couldn't ask about Aoki openly, so he could only inquire from the side and heard some rumors. But the message from GHOST is undoubtedly more accurate.

If Aoki disappears, it means that Huangliang can only fight alone, and it will become even more lonely from then on.

Another thing he was very worried about was that last time, he tricked Aoki into the closed dream corridor, but when Aoki came out, the whole life he had experienced disappeared like a dream, and he was pulled back to the moment before he put Aoki into the dream corridor.

The true and false life was indelible in his memory, almost making him schizophrenic, and he spent a lot of time letting his memory distinguish reality from that life.

Now that Aoki has disappeared again, will he return one day and pull the world back to a certain point in time? The point is that this time Aoki's disappearance has nothing to do with Huangliang, and it has nothing to do with Huangliang when he comes back, so even if Huangliang goes back to the past time, he can't bring back the memories of this life. For him, when Aoki returned, the world collapsed and was destroyed, just like that time, he came back, and the rest of the world was unaware.

Huang Liang prayed in his heart that nothing like that would happen again.

HE ASKED GHOST AGAIN: "And who are you?"

GHOST SAID: I'm GHOST.

Huang Liang asked: Are you a spontaneous consciousness on the Internet?

He waited for a long time, and GHOST didn't reply to the message.