Decoded (12 page)

Of course, if you don’t believe that π is indeed a constant, then Jinzhen’s thesis was completely useless – the theory upon which it was based falls through. On the other hand, if you accept that π is a constant, then you would be amazed by what he had managed to achieve – it was somewhat like bending an iron bar into the shape of a flower. In his thesis Jinzhen suggested that human intelligence should be regarded as a mathematical constant and an irrational number, one that never comes to an end. If you accept this concept, then the second part of Georg Weinacht’s binary theory comes into play, which could serve to resolve one of the major problems with developing artificial intelligence. Human intelligence also includes an element of confusion. Confusion is indefinable: it represents something that you cannot know completely; it is also something that you cannot replicate. Therefore he suggested that under present conditions, it is impossible to be very optimistic about the prospect of entirely replicating human intelligence by artificial means, since the closest you were going to get was a near approximation.

I should mention that there are plenty of mathematicians who entirely agree with Zhendi’s position, including many working today. You could say that there was nothing new about his conclusion: the interesting thing is that starting from a daring hypothesis about the binary nature of the mathematical constant π, he went on to develop a proof for this derived from pure mathematics. At least he was trying to develop a proof; the problem is that the materials he was using (the foundations of his house) had not been proved themselves.

To put it another way, if one day someone does succeed in proving that π is a constant, then the value of this thesis is clear. The problem is that this day still has not dawned, so strictly speaking, his work remains completely pointless – its only success lies in demonstrating his own intelligence and daring. But thanks to his connection with Young Lillie, many people found it difficult to believe that it was entirely his own work and hence his genius remained under question. The fact is that this thesis brought nothing good to Jinzhen: it did not change his life in any way, but it did change the very last years of Young Lillie’s life . . .

I can be absolutely categorical: Zhendi wrote that thesis all on his own. Daddy told me that apart from recommending a couple of reference books and writing the introduction, he had nothing to do with any of the contents – it was all Zhendi’s hard work. I remember what Daddy wrote in the introduction. He said, ‘The best way to deal with our demons is to go out and fight them – let the devils see how strong we are. Georg Weinacht is a demon infesting the sacred halls of scientific research, and for a long time he has been able to get away with murder. Now is the time for us to lay this demon to rest. This thesis will serve to set Weinacht’s pernicious theories in their place forever; although some of the notes that it strikes are dull and muffled, the rest ring true.’

Not long after the thesis was published, Daddy went on a trip to Beijing. No one knew what he was up to; he left quite suddenly one day without telling anyone what he was doing. About a month later, when someone came to N University with three decisions from the central authorities, we finally realized that this must have been the motive for Daddy’s earlier trip to Beijing. The three decisions were:

1. They gave permission for Daddy to resign as chancellor.

2. The government gave the necessary money to found a computer research unit at the university.

3. Daddy was going to be responsible for setting up this research facility.

At that time there were a lot of people who were hoping to be recruited by this new research facility, but after Daddy interviewed them, he decided in the end that none of them came up to Zhendi’s standard. Zhendi was the very first person recruited for the research facility and as things turned out he was the only person who could have done it – the remainder of the people hired were basically just his assistants, helping out with day-to-day tasks. This gave people a very bad impression, suggesting that this international standard research unit had basically been monopolized by members of the Rong family, and there was a lot of gossip about it.

The fact is that when Daddy was a government official, he was determined to demonstrate how impartial he was, particularly when it came to hiring new staff – he avoided giving a job to anyone with even the remotest connection to the family, to the point where he seemed positively heartless. We in the Rong family founded N University, and if you gathered together all the members of the clan who had worked there over the generations, at the very least you would have had enough people to fill a couple of dinner tables. When Grandpa (Old Lillie) was alive, he looked after the family, finding them jobs in the government and giving those in academia the opportunity to develop their talents, visit other institutions and learn something from them . . . But when it came to Daddy, to begin with he had an official position but no real power, so even if he had wanted to help out he would not have been able to. Later on, when he had both the official position and the power, he could have helped out but he didn’t choose to. During the years that Daddy was the chancellor of the university, he did not give a job to one single member of the Rong family, no matter how well qualified they were. Even in my case, the department recommended me for promotion a couple of times, wanting to make me assistant dean, but each time he turned it down. He put a cross down just like you would when finding a mistake on an examination paper. What happened to my brother was even more infuriating – he had come back to the country from abroad with a PhD in physics and he really should have been recruited by N University, but Daddy told him to go elsewhere. Just think about it: in C City, where else could he go? He ended up at the Normal University, but the working conditions and the level of the students were both significantly inferior – he took a job in a university in Shanghai the following year. Mummy was really furious with Daddy about this. She said that he was intentionally forcing our family to split up.

Well, when it came to recruiting Zhendi for the new research facility, all Daddy’s principles about not giving jobs to members of the family went out of the window. He ignored all the gossip and just did what he wanted – he seemed to have become completely obsessed. Nobody understood what could possibly have changed Daddy’s mind; but I knew, because one day he showed me the letter Jan Liseiwicz wrote just before he left. He said, ‘Liseiwicz’s letter did tempt me, but the real clincher was when I saw Jinzhen’s graduation thesis. Up until that moment I thought the whole thing was going to be impossible, but when I saw that I decided to give it a go. When I was young, I really hoped that one day I would be able to make some concrete contribution to science. Maybe it really is too late to start now, but Jinzhen has given me the confidence to try. You know, Liseiwicz is absolutely right: without Jinzhen, I would not stand a hope in hell; but with Jinzhen, who knows what we might not achieve? In the past, I have always underestimated the kid’s genius; now I am going to give him a real chance to show what he can do . . . ‘

That is how it all happened. As Master Rong said, her father was inspired to work on this project by Jinzhen – how could he possibly give the job to anyone else? She went on to explain that Jinzhen not only changed the last years of her father’s life, he also changed one of his long-standing principles – you could even say he changed his faith in humankind. In the very last years of his life, the old gentleman went back to the dreams of his youth – he decided to make a real contribution to the development of the field, to the point where he was prepared to discount as worthless everything he had done during most of his working life; everything he had done during his public career. It has always been one of the problems that Chinese intellectuals face: that they regard an academic career as fundamentally incompatible with an official position. Now the old gentleman was effectively starting his working life over again; whether this was a tragedy or a source of great delight, only time will tell.

Over the course of the next couple of years, the pair of them were completely immersed in their work for this research facility – they had very little to do with what was going on in the outside world. They attended the occasional mathematics conference and published a few papers; that was it. From the six papers that they co-authored which appeared in academic journals, it was clear that their work was progressing one step at a time – certainly their research was much further advanced than any other facility in the country, and they were not far behind the international cutting edge. After their first two papers were published in China, they were reprinted in three different international journals – indicating the importance of the results that they had achieved. It was around this time that the chief editor of
Time
magazine in the US, Roy Alexander, warned the American government: the next computer is going to be built by the Chinese! Jinzhen’s name was now news.

Of course, this was all media scare-mongering. The fact is that if you read this pair of papers closely, ignoring all the hype, you would immediately notice that they had encountered some very real problems in the course of their research. That was perfectly normal – after all a computer is not like a human brain; with people all you need is to have a man sleep with a woman and lo and behold! You have a new example of human intelligence created. Of course, in some cases once the new intelligence is created things go wrong – the result is someone with a mental handicap. In many ways, in the creation of artificial intelligence, what you were trying to do could be compared to turning a mentally handicapped person into a clever one – a very, very difficult task. Given the difficult nature of the task, frustration and setbacks are only to be expected – there is nothing to be surprised at there. In fact, it would be surprising if these frustrations and setbacks made you give up. Later on, when Young Lillie decided to let Jinzhen go, nobody believed a word of his explanation. He said, ‘We have encountered enormous problems in our research and if we carry on like this, I really cannot see any prospect of success. I don’t want to see such a talented and clever young man follow me down this questionable path, running the risk of ruining his own future. I want to make sure that he gets to do something meaningful.’

That was in the summer of 1956.

That same summer, everyone in the university was talking about the man who came to take Jinzhen away. People thought that the whole thing was most mysterious. Why Young Lillie was prepared to let Jinzhen go was much discussed, but without anyone coming up with a good answer – that was part of the mystery.

The man walked with a limp.

That was also part of the mystery.

This man’s surname was Zheng, and he walked with a limp. Perhaps because of this striking characteristic, it seemed as though he did not need a personal name – that it was an unnecessary ornament, like wearing a piece of jewellery. He will appear at various crucial junctures in this narrative – some of the time he will be anonymous and some of the time he will be referred to by the name Zheng the Gimp.

‘Zheng the Gimp!’

‘Zheng the Gimp!’

The mere fact that people were happy to call him that tells you one important fact about the man – his life was not defined by his physical disability. If you think about it, there are two possible reasons for such a reaction: One, that Zheng the Gimp got that way as the result of an honourable wound – it was the proof that he had once carried a gun and fought side-by-side with his comrades. Two, that Zheng the Gimp’s leg wasn’t that bad – it was just that his left leg was a little bit shorter than his right. When he was younger, such a difference could have been corrected by wearing a shoe with a thicker sole on the relevant foot, but once he got past fifty, he was reduced to walking with a cane. When I met him, he walked with a stick, but he was not the kind of old man that you can possibly overlook. This was in the early 1990s.

That summer, the summer of 1956, Zheng the Gimp was still in his thirties – a strong and healthy young man. Thanks to the built-up soles of the shoes he wore on his left foot, nobody realized his physical problems – his limp disappeared and to the outside observer, he looked pretty much like anyone else. It was purely by chance that the people at the university discovered what was wrong with him.

This is how it all came about. The afternoon of the day that Zheng the Gimp came to the university, the entire student body was in the main auditorium, listening to a report about the amazing feats of valour achieved by the heroes of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. The campus was very quiet and the weather was lovely. It was not roasting hot, that day, and there was a light breeze blowing, fluttering the leaves of the avenue of French plane trees growing on either side of the road. That light susurration made the university seem even quieter than it actually was. He found the peace of the place so striking that he decided to order his jeep to stop – telling the driver to come back three days later to collect him from the university guest house. He got out of the car and started walking through the grounds alone. Some fifteen years earlier, he had spent three years at the attached high school, followed by the freshman year at the university. After such a long absence, he was keenly aware of the changes that had overtaken his alma mater and he was overtaken by a strange sense of nostalgia – many memories from the past seemed to press around him as he walked slowly along, as if called to life by his footsteps. When the presentation for the students finished, he was standing just outside the auditorium. The crowd poured out of the hall, spreading out like a flood. In an instant, he found himself engulfed, surrounded on all sides. He followed the crowd nervously, worried that someone might bump into him; because thanks to his gammy leg, if he fell it would be impossible for him to get up. The students continued coming and he found himself being moved to the back of the crowd, but these stragglers picked him up and marched along, shoulder to shoulder. The young people around him were careful, though; every time it seemed as though someone were just about to knock him down, they moved away just in time to prevent a collision. Nobody looked back, nobody seemed to have so much as noticed him; clearly his special shoe hid his condition from all casual observers. Maybe knowing this gave him confidence; anyway, he started to feel a sudden affection for this band of students, male and female, so bright and lively, chatting with each other; like a bubbling stream carrying him along. He felt himself rejuvenated – time had rolled back fifteen years.

When they arrived at the playing field, the crowd broke up the way a wave does when it hits the sand. He was now in no danger of being knocked off his feet. It was just at that moment that he suddenly felt something fall against the back of his neck. Before he had time to react, the crowd were already beginning to shout: ‘Rain!’ ‘It’s raining!’ When this cry first went up, people didn’t move, they just looked up at the sky. A moment later, the first drops were followed by a huge bolt of lightning, and then the rain really did begin to hammer down, as if someone had turned on a high-pressure hose. Immediately the crowd began to scatter like a flock of frightened hens – some were running forward, others had turned back towards the auditorium, some were rushing towards nearby buildings, some were heading for the bike sheds. As people ran around shouting at each other, the playing field was reduced to chaos. He was now in a real fix – he couldn’t run and he couldn’t not run: if he ran people would realize that he had a gammy leg; if he didn’t run he was going to get soaked. Maybe he didn’t even particularly want to run – he had faced the full force of enemy fire so why should he be scared of rain? Of course he wasn’t bothered by the prospect of getting wet. But his feet were obeying commands from some other part of his brain – he was starting to hop forward, one foot striking out, the other dragging behind. That was the way he had to run, the way a lame man runs, one leap at a time, as if there was a shard of glass stuck in the bottom of his shoe.

When he first started, everyone else was too busy running themselves to pay any attention to him. Later on, when they had found sanctuary in nearby buildings, he was still in the middle of the playing field. He hadn’t wanted to run in the first place, he was hampered by his gammy leg, he was still carrying his suitcase – no wonder he was so slow! No wonder everyone else had vanished! Now, in the whole of that massive playing field, he was the only person to be seen – he stuck out like a sore thumb. Once he realized that, he decided to get away from the playing field as quickly as possible, but that meant having to hop even faster. It was valiant, it was comical; to the people watching, it seemed like this was all part of the spectacle. Some people even started to shout encouragement at him.

‘Faster!’

‘Faster!’

Once the cry of ‘Faster!’ went up, it attracted the attention of even more people. It seemed as if all eyes were fixed on him – he felt almost nailed in place by their stares. He immediately decided to stop, cheerfully waving his hands in the air: a gesture of appreciation for the people who had shouted encouragement to him. Afterwards he began to walk forward, a smile on his face, like an actor leaving the stage. At that moment, seeing him walk normally, it looked as if his hopping run had been put on: a performance. In reality, something that he tried to cover up had been glaringly revealed to everyone. You could say that this sudden rainstorm forced him to play a role which disclosed the secret of his gammy leg – on the one hand this embarrassed him, and on the other, it made sure that everyone recognized him as . . . a gimp! An amusing and friendly gimp. The fact is that when he left this place fifteen years earlier, having spent four years there, nobody noticed that he had gone. However, this time, in the space of just a couple of minutes, he had become famous throughout the university. A couple of days later, when he took Jinzhen away on his mysterious mission, everyone said, ‘It was the cripple who danced in the rain that took him away.’