Some lines had misspelled English words, or even a mix of half-width and full-width punctuation marks.
This wasn’t something a programmer would have written. It was raw garbage, manually entered by office clerks who didn’t know their way around a computer, using every bizarre input method imaginable.
"What’s wrong?"
Chen Zhuo could tell something was off with Chu Ge.
Chu Ge pointed at the mess of garbled text on the screen.
"The client wants us to run a test with this raw data."
Chu Ge rubbed his aching temples.
"This job is impossible. The data is too dirty. It’s full of human input errors that don’t follow any logical pattern whatsoever."
Chen Zhuo walked over and glanced at the screen.
"Can’t you write a regex script to filter it out?"
"No."
Chu Ge shook his head.
"Regular expressions can only catch patterns. Look at this line. They typed ’apple’ as ’pinguo,’ and right next to it is some weird internet slang. As soon as that hits the low-level logic, the program will flag it as an anomalous variable and crash."
Chu Ge gritted his teeth.
"These bastards. They don’t want to spend time cleaning up this garbage data themselves, so they think they can throw fifteen hundred bucks at me to code the program *and* clean the data."
Nearby, the sound of Chu Ge’s voice woke Lu Jia up.
He groggily sat up.
He glanced at the screen.
"There’s no mathematical pattern here."
Lu Jia came to a conclusion after a single glance, his voice still raspy with sleep.
"An algebraic equation can’t solve for random errors."
The room fell silent.
Chu Ge leaned back in his chair, looking at the twenty thousand lines of data on the screen, feeling deflated.
He had pulled an all-nighter, and his brain felt ready to explode.
And they were so close to the finish line.
"How about... I write a more complex script tomorrow? Add a few more conditional statements, filter what I can, and just see what happens?"
Even Chu Ge himself didn’t sound confident.
This was grunt work. Using code to guard against human stupidity was the most thankless task there was.
Chen Zhuo watched the garbled text scroll endlessly down the screen.
He reached for the mouse and scrolled down a few pages.
"No need for a script." Chen Zhuo let go of the mouse. "A machine can’t distinguish these kinds of random errors, but the human eye can."
Chu Ge was stunned.
"All twenty thousand lines? Purely by eye? How long would that take?"
"It’s slow for one person to check twenty thousand lines, of course."
Chen Zhuo walked over to his bookbag, took out a brand-new blank floppy disk, and inserted it into the floppy drive of Chu Ge’s computer.
Chen Zhuo dragged the text document full of raw data onto it.
He ejected the floppy disk and put it in his pocket.
He glanced at Chu Ge, then at Lu Jia, who was rubbing his eyes.
"Leave this job to me."
Chen Zhuo walked to the window and pulled the curtain aside slightly.
Outside, the sky was already beginning to lighten with the dawn.
"I don’t have classes this morning. You two shut down the computer and go get some sleep."
Chen Zhuo turned around.
"I’ll bring back the clean data tomorrow evening. You can run the program and submit it then."
Chu Ge opened his mouth, wanting to ask Chen Zhuo where he was going to find people to look through twenty thousand lines of data.
But seeing Chen Zhuo’s calm demeanor, he swallowed his words.
"Alright."
Chu Ge really couldn’t stay up any longer.
He shut down the computer.
He gathered up the scratch paper scattered all over the desk and stuffed it into his pocket.
He patted the still-snoring Wang Dayong.
Dayong woke up in a daze and wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth.
"Is it done running?"
"Yeah, it’s done. Go back to sleep."
Chu Ge stood up and stretched.
He glanced at Chen Zhuo, skipping the pleasantries.
"Thanks."
Chu Ge left Room 215 with Lu Jia.
「Ten in the morning. Keda’s old library.」
Sunlight filtered through the ivy leaves, casting a dappled pattern of light and shadow on the wooden floor.
There was hardly anyone at the circulation desk.
Su Wei was sitting on a high stool.
She held a well-worn, thread-bound book, carefully mending its loose pages.
Chen Zhuo walked over and placed the floppy disk he was holding on the wooden countertop.
It landed with a soft clack.
Su Wei looked up.
Her gaze fell on the floppy disk, then shifted to Chen Zhuo.
"Library card?" Su Wei asked.
"Not borrowing a book."
Chen Zhuo pulled over a nearby chair and sat down, looking at her from across the circulation desk.
"I’ve got a job for you, if you’re looking to make some extra cash."
Su Wei put down the thread-bound book and glue, then picked up a dry towel nearby to wipe her hands.
"I’m listening."
"This floppy disk has twenty thousand lines of messy text data."
Chen Zhuo pointed to the black plastic square.
"It’s filled with manually entered tags, full of spelling errors, gibberish, and meaningless symbols."
He looked into Su Wei’s eyes.
"A machine algorithm can’t filter out this kind of dirty data because there’s no logical pattern to the errors. It needs someone to go through it line by line, delete the bad lines, and keep the ones that are formatted correctly."
Su Wei looked at the floppy disk without a word, mentally assessing the workload.
"Twenty thousand lines. If you’re fast, you could be done by tomorrow."
Chen Zhuo’s tone was even.
"Get it to me before six p.m. tomorrow. Fifty bucks."
Su Wei reached out and took the floppy disk.
She flipped it over to look at the back.
"What is this, then? The outsourced work of an outsourcing job?"
The corner of Su Wei’s mouth twitched slightly.
Chen Zhuo smiled.
"You could say that. A ragtag crew ran into some manual labor that raw computing power can’t solve."
Su Wei slipped the floppy disk into the pocket of her vest.
"I’ll take the job. But I can’t just plug random floppy disks into the library computers. I’ll have to wait until I get back to the dorm tonight and borrow my roommate’s computer to look at it."
"That’s fine. I’ll come get it tomorrow afternoon."
Chen Zhuo stood up, ready to leave.
"Wait."
Su Wei called out to him.
Chen Zhuo turned back.
"If it’s a text document, all twenty thousand lines of data are continuous."
Su Wei looked at him.
"I’ve read a bit about this kind of thing before. If I delete a line, how will you ensure the corresponding images don’t get misaligned when you import the data?"

Comments

Loading...