Translator: Dreamscribe
John's interview sent shockwaves through the political world.
[NYC Mayor Directly Criticizes Boston. "Patrick Is a Hypocrite"]
Political experts assessed John's remarks as follows:
"That interview wasn't done without reason.
It was intended to suppress early public sentint viewing Patrick as a potential candidate for the next NYC mayoral race.
At the sa ti, by publicly announcing the recruitnt of MIT and Yu Seo-ha, he was likely trying to shed the narrative that he lacked follow-through."
The broadcasting network added that "if Mayor John's statents prove true, a reassessnt of credit for the Boston project will be unavoidable."
[Patrick's Side Refuses Official Comnt. City Hall in Uproar.]
-Boston City Hall was thrown into extre disarray following the New York mayor's bombshell remarks yesterday.
Mayor John claid during a press conference that Mayor Patrick had made no contribution to the transportation reform, and released detailed information based on internal docunts as evidence.
The issue was that this information had been contained in classified files accessible only to senior city officials.
A Boston city executive who requested anonymity told this paper the following:
"Only five people had access to those docunts. It's clearly an internal leak."
Another official described the current situation as an "ergency".
"The mayor's office has been turned upside down.
Mayor Patrick feels an extre sense of betrayal and has shown a determination to find the leaker at all costs."
[Political Comntators: "Boston's Political Landscape Will Be Shaken to Its Core"]
└Wow.... at this point isn't this basically all-out war?
└Not all-out war, more like a one-sided beating. Karma, maybe? Patrick was poking at the NYC mayor's nerves for a while.
└The dia hyping Patrick up like so hero was way over the top. It was uncomfortable to watch.
└So the MIT researcher was legit. Yu Seo-ha?
└Has politics ever been this entertaining? lmao
└Why did John suddenly draw his sword? The polls must've been looking really bad.
└I'm soone close to the situation and yeah, Patrick cutting the budget was true. There was a lot of talk internally too.
└I don't care who does it, just please fix New York's traffic already.
Slam-
Jake hurriedly opened the door to the mayor's office and walked in.
"Mr. Mayor, the response is enormous.
Political channels are running your interview nonstop. Community reactions are split, but the important thing is the number of people viewing your decisiveness favorably is growing."
John read through the report with a faint smile.
"I think that about does it. Push the article."
John was a skilled politician.
If he hadn't been, he never would have beco mayor of New York in the first place.
"Yes, sir!"
Jake distributed the materials he had prepared for this very day to all the dia outlets at once.
[We Chose the Best Team for New York's Future.]
-New York City officially announced this morning that it has signed a formal contract with MIT research team Team Apex for a complete overhaul of the city's traffic signal system.
Mayor John stated the following in his announcent:
"MIT's Yu Seo-ha has designed the most sophisticated and outstanding algorithm among all existing transportation infrastructure models.
New York will now have the opportunity to discard its outdated system and unlock the city's full potential.
The world's finest software will be layered atop the visionary urban frawork created by Gouverneur Morris and Sion DeWitt in 1811.
I declare this:
This decision will bring the center of 21st-century urban innovation back to New York."
A city official stated that starting this week, Team Apex, led by Yu Seo-ha, would begin analyzing seven years' worth of real-ti traffic data collected from across New York.
└Wow! I thought it was all talk, but John actually pulled it off.
└Who's Yu Seo-ha?
└So kind of insane genius? There's no shortage of testimonies saying he's out of his mind.
└Seo-ha! Do sothing about Seoul too. I don't wanna spend three hours a day commuting!
└I'm Korean too, but maybe take a look at the budget being poured into this project first?
└The way I see it, New York is unsolvable. It's just too many people cramd into too little space. How do you fix that? Unless you're gonna relocate everyone.
Yu Seo-ha,
a fifteen-year-old genius mathematician now tasked with solving the traffic problems of the world's largest city.
The eyes of many were fixed squarely on him.
* * *
6 AM.
At an hour when the lights in all the surrounding buildings had gone dark, there stood one building glowing like a lighthouse in the center of a city of shadows.
The NYC Departnt of Transportation had dispatched a large contingent of personnel to MIT. They set up headquarters in the shared research zone between Buildings 2 and 4 and began their work in earnest.
Dozens of screens, maps displaying New York's grid-patterned streets in real ti, black monitors with algorithm code scrolling endlessly upward.
At the center of it all sat a boy.
"Data from the New York City servers has started coming in!"
Soone called out.
Seo-ha's eyes turned toward the data stream flowing in in real ti.
Vehicle flow, pedestrian patterns, weather changes, accident location statistics; all information was pouring into the lab's servers.
Seo-ha watched the screen and nodded.
"Good. Shall we see for ourselves what kind of city New York really is?"
A population thirteen tis that of Boston.
An area seven tis as large.
Traffic network complexity at least twenty tis greater.
A wave of data incomparably larger than before crashed over the lab.
The Boston project had been manageable with 5.6 billion sample data points, but New York had already surpassed 10 billion within just ten minutes of the first stream coming in.
"Hm? This is going to get a lot more complicated, isn't it?"
When Seo-ha muttered this, Theo and Sri, who were standing beside him, flinched.
Having been delegated full authority over the project, Seo-ha decided to design the ideal system for this city.
Seo-ha stood up from his seat.
"Everyone, please gather in the conference room."
The personnel in the lab began moving busily.
Engineers dispatched from New York, a theoretical mathematics team from MIT recruited specifically for the project, the data analysis team, simulation engineers, and even aide Jake, who was attending to file reports.
More than forty high-level specialists filled every seat at the tables in the large conference room.
Seo-ha stood in the center of the room.
Though he was younger than anyone else there, he carried an overwhelming presence that radiated from the track record he had built.
Seo-ha slowly surveyed the conference room.
"Alright. I've gotten a decent grasp of New York's data now."
Seo-ha pointed at the screen where data was streaming in.
"Based on this, the conclusion I've reached is..."
Gulp.
What kind of work lay ahead?
A mix of tension and curiosity was written across every face.
"My assessnt is that the model we used in Boston can be applied to New York as well."
"Phew."
"Thank god."
"Seriously. I was so worried we'd have to start from scratch."
"Well, the system we built back then was pretty much flawless."
Voices of relief ca from all around.
Most of them were researchers who had worked together on the Boston project.
"However!"
Seo-ha raised his index finger, drawing every pair of eyes in the room.
"Only in a single sector."
Beep-
At Seo-ha's signal, Theo clicked the mouse button.
A map of New York, different from the one shown earlier, appeared on the screen.
Brrring-
Another click of the mouse, and lines began to be drawn in every direction, dividing the city into sections.
Forty in total.
"..."
"..."
The conference room fell silent.
Everyone stared at the screen as if srized.
Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island. New York had been divided into forty large pieces, like a massive puzzle.
Lisa, a data engineer from the MIT side, quietly raised her hand.
"Did you create those sections for Manhattan with density in mind?"
"Yes!"
Seo-ha nodded.
From Washington Heights to Midtown, the area around Central Park, Downtown, and the extrely congested Lower Manhattan. Seo-ha had drawn the boundaries with precision, taking into account density, flow variations, and even terrain.
"Think of it as ten systems identical to the one in Boston being placed within Manhattan."
An engineer dispatched from New York murmured in a trembling voice.
"Each one of those pieces is equivalent to all of Boston?"
"That's right. Sectors 5 and 6 in southern Manhattan, in particular, are about 1.4 tis the size of Boston."
A small gasp escaped from the back of the conference room.
"Then will each of these forty sectors operate on independent algorithms?"
Seo-ha shook his head.
"In terms of population, scale, and traffic, Boston was a predictable city. But New York is not. If you designed a model like that, it wouldn't last ten minutes.
New York's traffic congestion has already exceeded its tipping point."
Boston could be controlled with a single function governing all variables.
It was possible to process the information and derive the optimal solution. But New York, Seo-ha concluded, was a city where no single correct answer existed.
"New York isn't a function. It's interaction itself."
One-dinsional information exchange based on sensors could not handle all of this.
"So we're going to turn every intersection in New York into an AI node. Forty distributed brains will receive and process the data from those nodes."
Sri raised his hand.
"There's no central control system?"
"Each local agent will make its own decisions, but I'm planning to build a structure where the central system only intervenes in ergency or abnormal situations.
You could call it a sort of 'ta AI'; a higher-order AI for control, coordination, and oversight."
Thousands of intersection AI nodes and forty sector AIs.
To make all of them cooperate, a coordinator capable of balancing the entire network would be needed.
A brain that would one day silently govern New York; Seo-ha intended to build it.
"W-wait!"
Theo's face went white as realization struck him.
"Then who's designing the forty sector AIs?"
Even with a reference model, the process of organizing algorithms, establishing formulas, experintation, verification, optimization, and policy design... typically, building a single AI like this required dozens of researchers working for months on end.
But what New York needed now was...
"Hold on, we're building all forty separately?"
"Don't we have to? The data distributions are different for each sector."
"Is this really a feasible scale of work?"
Seo-ha looked at them with a bright smile.
"That's obviously going to be your job! I plan to focus on building the brain."
The air in the conference room froze in an instant.
Everyone stared at Seo-ha with expressions that said 'He's joking, right?', but there wasn't a shred of humor to be found on his face.
"Then I'll leave it in your capable hands!"
Seo-ha gave a polite bow and walked out of the conference room.
Thud!
The sound of the door closing rang out unusually loud.
"..."
"..."
For a while, no one could speak.
But as seasoned researchers, they quickly gathered themselves and began dividing up the work.
"Let's start by looking at the reference model."
"Math team, first please rework the team leader's core equations into a form that 'humans can actually understand.' Those who aren't confident in math, start by organizing the variable lists for each sector."
The project began to move.
Theo joined the math team, and Sri attached himself to the engineering team.
When Theodore gestured, the math departnt's PhD candidates and postdocs all gathered to one side.
From one to two, two to three, they ran out of whiteboards and had to borrow more several tis. Groans of frustration erupted here and there, but since it was a major project that had the world's attention, not a single person dropped out.
A month passed like that, and the day ca for the New York Tis Magazine to be published.
Passersby on the street gazed at the newsstands with curious eyes.
The figure gracing the front page of this heavyweight weekly, published every Sunday, was neither a politician nor the CEO of a major corporation.
'THE ARCHITECT'
-A 15-year-old boy designing the brain of New York's transportation system. Can he truly change the reality of a New York that has beco one giant parking lot?
Perched on the window fra of a high-rise building, gazing down at the night view,
beyond the glass stretched a long line of red brake lights tracing the city's downtown skyline.
New York, no, the world was waiting for the mont this one boy's calculations would be complete.
User Comments
0 comments from readers