After the public lecture, it was 6:30 PM.
In a small conference room in the east wing of the Guanghua Building.
The room wasn’t large and was furnished with a single round table.
When Li Dong pushed the door open and entered, seven or eight people were already seated inside.
Shen Wei was at the head of the table, with Professor Wu Jianguo seated beside him. Li Dong didn’t recognize most of the others.
Shen Wei stood up with a smile and began to introduce them to Li Dong one by one.
"Li Dong, this is Professor Zhu Lin from our School of Mathematics. He’s a Changjiang Scholar and specializes in Algebraic Geometry."
"Hello, Teacher Chu."
Professor Zhu Lin smiled and extended his hand.
"Ah, Li Dong, I attended your lecture today."
"I’ve been working in Algebraic Geometry for many years, but it was only today that I feel I’ve truly grasped the meaning of the word ’split’ in the context of Gaussian Integers."
Li Dong knew, of course, that the professor was just being polite, so he responded with equal courtesy.
"You’re too kind, Teacher Chu."
Shen Wei then gestured toward a middle-aged, bespectacled man sitting next to Zhu Lin.
"This is Professor Fan Yimin from our School of Life Sciences, a recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars."
"Teacher Fan Yimin?"
Li Dong froze for a moment.
He had dabbled in the field of chemistry over the past few months, but he really hadn’t touched upon life sciences.
But he had heard Lu Mingyuan mention this Teacher Fan’s name before.
Fan Yimin’s work was on the preclinical translation of single-atom nanozymes for cardiovascular diseases, a field that directly aligned with Wu Kai’s research project.
"Hello, Teacher Fan."
Fan Yimin stood up and shook his hand.
"A pleasure, Li Dong."
The remaining few included Teacher Pang from the Fudan University School of Mathematics, who worked on analytic number theory; Teacher Fang from the School of Physics, who specialized in condensed matter; and a vice dean from the School of Pharmacy with the surname Shi.
Every single one of them held titles like Changjiang Scholar, National Distinguished Young Scholar, or was part of the Thousand Talents Plan.
After making a round of handshakes, Li Dong finally took his seat.
He had thought he’d be able to enjoy a nice meal tonight, but it turned out that every few minutes, one of the professors would slowly put down their chopsticks and pull out their phone.
"Li Dong, let’s exchange contact information. It’ll be easier to communicate in the future."
Li Dong would then put down his own chopsticks, force a smile, and present his QR code.
His QR code was scanned eight times, and he had only managed to take two bites of the braised pork chop with scallions in front of him.
Fan Yimin watched him for a moment from across the table. Likely realizing the young man wasn’t getting a chance to eat, he proactively served him a piece of Dongpo pork.
"Li Dong, eat this to line your stomach first. The professors over there are going to toast you in a bit."
Li Dong: ’...I can’t drink!’
Sure enough, a round of red wine was poured. Shen Wei led the toasts, followed by Teacher Pang, and then Teacher Fang.
Each toast was half a glass, and he couldn’t refuse a single one.
Li Dong had no idea how many glasses he ended up drinking.
He only knew that by the time a beaming Academician Shen Wei saw him to the conference room door, he felt like he was floating.
The campus shuttle took him back to his hotel.
As soon as Li Dong got back to his room, he collapsed onto the bed and let out a long sigh of relief.
This dinner had been more exhausting than his public lecture for five hundred people earlier today.
Li Dong lay on the bed for about ten minutes before the heady effects of the red wine slowly began to fade.
He pushed himself up into a sitting position and opened his laptop.
The screen lit up, revealing a small black ball in the bottom-right corner.
A progress bar hovered above its head.
Li Dong rubbed his eyes. ’No, that’s not right.’
Lately, because of Xiaohai, Li Dong had been auditing every SNN-related course he could find at the School of Information Science.
He had also done some research on his own, so he had a general idea of how Xiaohai’s "feeding" process worked now.
He hadn’t fed it any new material since that first time.
But this progress bar... it had climbed by 0.001% on its own.
’This extra 0.001% above Xiaohai’s head... did it figure this out on its own?’
’Did it automatically generate something new that it didn’t know before, all while ’digesting’ those elementary school textbooks?’
Li Dong’s heart skipped a beat.
He quickly opened his Memory Palace and found his notes from the "Discussion on Neuromorphic Computing."
"During the first two years of a human infant’s neural development, there is a process called ’synaptic pruning.’"
"They first wildly sprout a huge number of synapses, then, during periods of sleep and rest, silently prune the useless connections and reinforce the useful ones."
"During this process, you don’t need to feed them anything new. They grow on their own."
A sudden chill ran down Li Dong’s spine.
According to this explanation, the extra 0.001% above Xiaohai’s head was the same as a three-month-old baby learning to roll over on its own.
Li Dong rubbed his temples.
He opened the diagnostic panel and checked several background metrics.
The spike-firing heat map, the membrane potential evolution curve, the synaptic plasticity update distribution, and the cross-node IB link logs.
Every one of them was clean.
No out-of-bounds memory access, no abnormal external requests.
The rejection logs for cgroup and seccomp were all zero.
Li Dong then isolated the firewall rules under the network namespace to take a look; they were also clean.
He sighed to himself. ’Everything seems to be in order.’
’So that 0.001% really was something Xiaohai figured out on its own?’
Just as he was puzzling over it, unable to find an answer.
A line of text popped up in Xiaohai’s window on the laptop screen.
[Master, why are you looking at my body?]
Li Dong: ?????
’Wait, what kind of shameless line is that?’
He sat up straight, his eyes glued to the screen as a second line of text appeared.
[Master, Xiaohai didn’t understand the lecture you gave today...]

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