Translator: Dreamscribe
Michael stared intently at the monitor screen.
“Is all of this actual road data?”
Lisa, the data engineer from MIT, pointed at the screen as she spoke.
“Yes, it’s a week’s worth of accumulated data. We're receiving signals in real-ti from the transportation authority's sensors, and the model is generating predicted routes on its own.”
On the screen, the roads of the city center were slowly changing colors.
The red zones gradually decreased, and green spread all the way into the heart of the city. The movent was so precise and natural that it felt like watching the actual flow of traffic.
“It’s hard to believe this was programd by a human. How is it even...”
Lisa nodded as if she understood.
“I get it. I felt the sa. Seo-ha wrote all of this code himself.”
‘He did this much on his own? Doesn’t he divide the work?’
“Amazing.”
“There are still parts we don’t fully understand. Just when we think we’re catching up, he changes the code. It’s updated every week.”
“To , it looks perfect as it is.”
Lisa shook her head.
“I thought so too, last week and the week before that. But every ti Seo-ha updates the algorithm, the traffic flow clearly improves.”
Michael was genuinely impressed.
“It’s incredible that such thinking is even possible. Models of this scale usually stop being touched once they stabilize.”
Does the word compromise not exist in his mind?
“Seo-ha’s goal doesn’t seem to be stabilization. Even as he updates it, he keeps the path open. Thanks to that, this system evolves every day.”
Lisa looked at the code with a look of awe.
Seo-ha’s algorithm wasn’t linear like typical code. Every function affected the others, interlocking with artistic precision.
‘How far does he have to go to feel satisfied?’
“Huh?”
There was an accident in the simulation. As the signal at the accident site stopped, five traffic lights in the vicinity reacted simultaneously. The accident site was a ss, but the impact didn’t spread throughout the city.
It gave her chills.
It was as if a brilliant operator connected to a neural network was coordinating the situation in real ti.
‘If he ever harbored malicious intent, how much could he destroy humanity?’
A mad scientist from an SF movie popped into her head.
“How’s Seo-ha doing these days?”
Lisa asked as she looked at Jason.
He had been organizing supplies in the lab since morning.
“He spends more ti sitting with his eyes closed in contemplation. It might just be my impression, but he seems quite on edge.”
Lisa nodded.
Every researcher goes through that kind of phase. Knowing that even that genius was no exception gave her a strange sense of relief.
Another accident occurred in the simulation.
An exceptional situation.
The system tried to recover from the confusion. But then another major accident occurred.
A chain collision. The city center was in chaos.
“Huh?”
“What’s going on?”
Noise broke out everywhere.
A startled Lisa rushed to the monitor.
Suddenly, the screen froze and flickered.
The city, which had been bathed in green, turned gray in an instant.
Then warning windows began to pop up one after another.
[Simulation stopped.]
[Error: signal feedback undefined.]
“Stopped?”
"What's going on?"
Lisa quickly tapped on the keyboard.
“The sensor data is normal. There’s no problem with the network either.”
She zood in on the city center.
From the central intersection, red dots began to spread.
A few seconds later, all the lights on the surrounding roads went out.
The engineer in charge of the simulation stared at the screen in dismay.
“A-All sections have stopped responding.”
What on earth was going on?
Lisa bit her lip.
The engineer tried to recover the situation by opening the logs. But he couldn’t make sense of anything.
“This doesn’t make sense. We tested this version perfectly!”
Everyone panicked at the unexpected error.
“What’s going on?”
From the back, the voice of Deputy Director Alan was heard.
As soon as he entered, he looked over the status board.
“Lisa, let’s prepare for rollback right away. To last week’s version.”
Lisa nodded.
In a case of a major error like this, it was better not to even try fixing it.
Tap tap tap.
“Loading the backup model.”
At that mont, soone shouted urgently from the back.
“Wait!”
It was Seo-ha.
He was breathing heavily, having rushed over.
His hands were covered in chalk dust.
“Deputy Director, if we roll back now, we won’t be able to find the cause of the error. Please give so ti.”
Alan quietly shook his head.
“Seo-ha, I want to do that too, but we don’t have ti. If we don’t finalize the model by the end of this month, the transportation bureau’s pilot schedule will all be delayed.”
His voice was firm.
But Seo-ha didn’t back down.
“Two days...”
“What?”
“Just give two days. If I can’t solve it by then, you can go ahead and roll back.”
Alan stared at Seo-ha. In his stubborn eyes was the will to never give up.
He sighed and nodded.
“I’m sorry to put this much pressure on you.”
“No, thank you.”
Seo-ha apologized to everyone, then quickly left the office.
Thud.
Alan sank into a chair and held his head in his hands.
There wasn’t just one or two people whose fate was tied to this project. The pressure made him feel like throwing up.
“Deputy Director, don’t we need to start ordering equipnt?”
On the desk, all sorts of contracts and schedules were scattered.
“I know, Tom.”
Signal controllers, data servers, and countless devices and sensors were still waiting for order placent without finalized specifications.
Since the algorithm hadn’t been finalized, they couldn’t write the firmware, so everything was at a complete standstill.
The City of Boston still hadn’t approved the budget needed for the project.
What was barely keeping them afloat now was the budget secured last year and the transportation bureau’s ergency fund.
Even though the mayor was trying to persuade them, the city council continued to insist, “Given the size of the budget, we’ll provide support after seeing the results of the pilot.”
Bang!
Alan slamd the desk.
“Damn it. We need money to get results! Saying they’ll give the budget after we show performance, what kind of nonsense is that?!”
The initial plan had been to allow 12 weeks for algorithm developnt.
But now they didn’t even have the luxury to wait 4 weeks.
Alan felt like he had done sothing terrible to Seo-ha.
It was one of those monts when the cigarettes he quit years ago ca desperately to mind.
***
Click.
As soon as Seo-ha returned to the office, he turned off the lights.
The silent lab was swallowed in darkness. Only the faint glow from the monitor lit up the desk.
The screen showing the frozen code was still on.
Rattle.
He opened a drawer and took out a chocolate bar.
He needed to fuel up if he was going to last two days.
Thump-thump.
Seo-ha’s heart pounded violently.
He had already been pushing himself too hard since last week. His weakened body was begging him to rest.
But Seo-ha felt a sense of responsibility.
What had started as his assignnt had now beco a major city initiative. He was aware of the difficulty caused by the budget not being approved.
‘If I finish early, that solves everything.’
He steadied his mind.
Click.
As he pressed the CD player, a piano performance of Gyeo-ul began to flow out.
Handel’s Passacaglia.
The beautiful lody gently filled the lab.
His tightly strung nerves slowly began to relax.
Seo-ha closed his eyes and exhaled repeatedly, evening out his breath. His inner companion reached out a hand toward him. Seo-ha naturally took it.
“Ducky! This isn’t the ti to hesitate. Let’s start right away.”
He pulled up the logs on the large screen.
Thousands of lines of code covered the screen. Ducky began analyzing the data that was streaming across the screen.
“It started at the center of the city, right?”
He whispered as if talking to soone and zood in on the screen.
Intersection 17 in the frozen simulation.
The flow of data had been cut off as if a lightbulb had gone out.
Seo-ha steadied his breathing and closed the log window.
Numbers and symbols continued to stream across the screen. A chain collision followed by a system shutdown.
Intersections 17, 18, and 21 were all referencing the sa data simultaneously. They were holding each other back, each waiting on the other’s decision.
“A feedback loop...”
It was a phenonon caused by the increasing precision of the system’s synchronization.
Because everything was too perfectly interlocked, all the signals had issued commands at the exact sa timing. The issue could be solved by introducing slight delays between the signals.
But Seo-ha didn’t like that idea. If he compromised that way, the delays would ripple throughout the system and eventually turn the whole thing sluggish.
In the city center, even a one-second delay in traffic signals could cause a jam for thousands of vehicles.
Seo-ha bit his lip and approached the blackboard.
"Don't be ridiculous. I'm not going to make you slow. I'll make you faster than anyone, but never let you stop."
Seo-ha decided to completely overhaul the entire system.
A line ford in his mind.
One by one, hundreds and thousands of nodes connected by lines branched out like a complex tree.
The entire logical structure of the algorithm was drawn in his head.
Response tis of each node, directions of signal interference, pressure distribution at intersections, soon a massive structure consisting of billions of nodes appeared.
To Seo-ha, it looked vivid enough to touch with his hands. And he also understood the system’s limits.
“Was parallel processing too much for you?”
Scratch scratch.
The chalk slid across the blackboard.
Seo-ha began redesigning the functions from the ground up.
“Then I’ll give you a hierarchy. Lower levels read patterns, upper levels make decisions.”
Before long, the equations had covered an entire blackboard.
But that was fine. The room had chalkboards on three sides.
Formulas and graphs tangled chaotically, but in Seo-ha’s mind was a clear image of the fully completed structure.
A model that didn’t need to separate the order of processing even if hundreds of accidents occurred simultaneously, one that processed incoming data through other layers without making it wait.
The algorithm he was designing went far beyond simple parallel computation or automatic control.
Billions of nodes responded at the sa ti, each making decisions suited to its own situation. Each node had thousands of branches, and each branch was connected to another lower layer.
It was an extrely risky attempt where even a single error or delay could bring down the entire system.
‘It’s okay. This is the right way.’
Ducky nodded as if in agreent.
“I’m not who I used to be, rember?”
Since arriving at MIT, Seo-ha had achieved rapid growth.
Anyone else would have said it was reckless and tried to stop him. But Seo-ha’s hands didn’t hesitate.
His imasurable mathematical ability made it possible. The system, once deed impossible, began to take form at his fingertips.
***
Two days later, MIT dia Lab E14.
The air in the eting room was heavy. Each ti the river wind tapped against the glass windows, the researchers reflexively flinched, their shoulders tensing.
“Still no word?”
Lisa bit her nails anxiously.
Ellie sighed as she looked at her laptop screen.
“The connection’s still active. But there hasn’t been a single log of him accessing the main server. It looks like he’s been in that room alone the whole ti.”
“For two days?”
“Yes.”
“The light was still on early this morning. I saw a shadow while walking down the hallway.”
The agreed-upon ti was approaching.
Alan pulled out his phone, then put it back down.
Dozens of researchers were waiting on his decision.
“This won’t do. I need to go see for myself.”
Alan stood from his seat and headed toward Seo-ha’s office.
The other researchers, curious about the situation themselves, followed behind him.
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