Cyber Heroes

"Wait a moment, wait a moment, let me take a moment..." Xiang Shan temporarily cut off his vision and said, "What did you call me?"

"Father," the individual replied.

Xiang Shan was a little confused: "What the hell is this? Is this the Xi Daddy? Why?"

"Do you need me to explain it all over again? Father." The individual replied: "In 2031, the Rama Project launched the 'Ant Colony' project, aiming to confuse the public and package the leaked parts into a symbolic puzzle game for Mass promotion.”

"This project can explain to a small number of people with technical skills the code that does not conform to the general laws of computers on Earth. At the same time, this is also your first attempt to use other people's brains to explore human understanding of 'non-human symbol systems' learning ability.”

"You used that large piece of leaked code as a puzzle game..."

"Stop it, stop it, stop it." Xiang Shan waved his hand: "I remembered, this is what happened."

He even found an "unnamed rich man" to provide a prize worth five million US dollars for this puzzle game three years ago.

In 1982, the legendary game company Atari successively released a game called "Sword Quest" on the Atari 2600. Game designers put forward the concept of "combining games with reality". Therefore, "Sword Hunt" is not only a video game, but also a series of treasure hunt activities based on this series of games.

In this activity, players need to solve puzzles in the RPG series of "Looking for Swords", and then mail the clues they find to Atari's corporate headquarters - that was an era when "game servers" did not exist. The company will select the fastest and best puzzle solvers among these players and let these players come to the company for the finals.

The winner of the first chapter of the RPG "Underworld" will receive an "talisman" made of 18K pure gold, set with 12 diamonds, and engraved with gold patterns of the zodiac around it. The winner of Chapter 2 "World of Fire" will receive a Holy Grail, made of platinum and decorated with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, pearls, jaspers, etc. The prize in Chapter 3 "Water World" is a crown made of pure gold, embellished with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and aquamarines. In the final "Qi World", the prize is a "Philosopher's Stone". The body is a large piece of pure white jade, wrapped in a layer of 18K gold, and inlaid with topaz, ruby, and diamonds.

The cost of each of these four treasures is US$25,000.

And at the end, the winners of the four worlds have a final battle. Search for the ultimate treasure, a sword. The hilt of the sword is made of 18K pure gold, and the sword body is made of pure silver. It is decorated with diamonds, topaz, sapphires and rubies and is worth up to $50,000. This is why this event is called "Sword Hunting".

However, due to Atari's reputation plummeting in other projects, the campaign was never completed. "Qi World" was stillborn, and the final "sword hunt" could only become a legend.

And this activity has also set off waves around the world.

Then……

This data was severely broken by the "unnamed rich man".

Even taking into account the "numerical inflation"... ahem, "inflation" factor, the numerical reward given by the "unnamed rich man" is still a numerical reward that crushes the "Sword Hunting" activity.

It is true that the prize pools of some popular e-sports projects will be higher than this. The prize money for the championship team is also higher than this. But that's often a team's gain.

And this is "the decryptor directly received five million US dollars."

Moreover, "Rich" also provides a complete set of solutions. If the decryption process of the final decryptor cites the staged results of other solvers, then the discoverer of each staged result can receive an additional reward.

"Rich" has also set up a dedicated player community for players to publish decryption strategies and mark the release time.

Finally, the "rich man" happily claimed that he had a lonely best friend who hid his heart and his gift to mankind in this game. He hopes that humans can successfully interpret the painstaking achievements of an autistic genius.

Such a gimmicky story is naturally conducive to dissemination.

That game became one of the most famous games in human history.

In the following years, a group of players explored an unfamiliar symbol system with a "game" attitude, which also gave professional researchers countless inspirations.

Some researchers who have nothing to do with Project Rama have indirectly completed research on alien languages ​​by studying the behavior of those player groups.

In the following years, Ingrid also completed some meaningful projects.

However, the project was never abandoned.

In reality, that "five million dollars" was just a blank check. What Xiangshan really did was to convince the person in charge of the big country behind the Rama project to give him the power to "write a blank check."

This is actually not easy, but at least it is easier than directly asking for five million US dollars.

And as more and more professionals enter the game, players also begin to believe that there is really an autistic genius who, deep in his heart that no one can understand, has created such a stylish game world. ——At least the decryption system and symbol system as the main gameplay are quite "hardcore" and "professional".

And then……

Time came to the fifties.

With the Superman Enterprise in full swing, the game has become popular again.

Everyone has realized that the "difficult puzzles" in this game actually come from aliens.

Taking advantage of this trend, Xiang Shan simply continued to hype it up. He announced that all consumers of the several game companies he controls can obtain the latest version of the puzzle game for free with their consumption vouchers. When they play this game, they will contribute part of their computing power to train specialized AI to understand it.

This is actually more of a show than reality project. AI cannot perfectly process human natural language, let alone the language of aliens. However, "generative adversarial networks" are an easily addictive toy. Even people like Xiang Shan, who has escaped from low-level taste to a certain extent, are inevitably attracted by it. When they think of a good topic, they can't help but start GAN.

Then……

Unbeknownst to Xiangshan, this project was actually running until the eve of the Sublimation War. The last group of programmers at Superman Enterprises fully opened the project to the Internet. On the eve of the destruction of Earth's old Internet, this game that once became an important part of popular culture was also packaged into data and escaped to the new Internet of the solar system built under the leadership of Yawgmoth.