I ask you to build tractors, but you build rockets?

Just as passenger plane N755C1 took off, an equally important passenger plane landed in Beijing.

A group of foreigners with mixed hair colors came down from the top. They walked in a hurry after coming down and quickly left in a car.

They belong to Vodafone, Sweden's Ericsson, and the Chinese communications giant Alcatel.

Zhang Siren, the director of the Science and Technology Commission, who has been promoted to a regular position, personally came to greet them. In addition to him, there were also important figures from Huawei, Jingwei Information and Telecom, and Telecom.

They will decide the success or failure of two things this time: the acquisition of Vodafone Italy's Italian branch, and the development of a new generation of high-speed communication protocols with Alcatel and Ericsson.

The former is the first step for domestic communication operators to enter Europe, and the latter is for the further promotion of the ternary system.

The relationship between the two is very close. The main breakthrough point is that Huanghe Semiconductor and Modu Microelectronics jointly promoted the research and development of a new generation of 28nm silicon carbide chip production lines and began to charge towards 20nm and 14nm processes.

In the chip field in the past two years, two hot words have emerged: silicon carbide and ternary.

Although ternary smart devices account for less than 3% of the domestic share so far, industry insiders have clearly recognized its huge potential and the country's firm determination.

Coupled with Huanghe Semiconductor's frenzied registration of patents, companies around the world are grabbing the spotlight.

Qualcomm has even released its first-generation ternary chip developed by itself. The plan is to provide AI computing functions as a mobile phone co-processor. Although it has not yet been launched, it has proven its recognition by established manufacturers.

Since the ternary system is likely to compete with the binary system in the future, it is quite necessary to make an ecological layout in advance. The Science and Technology Commission used this as a bait to attract three telecommunications giants and saw the hope of opening up the global market.

Zhang Siren was sitting in the back seat of the newly equipped Xin'an commercial vehicle when he suddenly saw an MPV passing by outside the window.

The shape of that MPV looked cheap at first glance, and there were a few strange and obvious protrusions around the roof, which seemed a bit inconsistent, but the most attractive thing was the empty cab.

This is a self-driving new energy vehicle that was put into operation after New Year's Day in Xin'an. It is specially approved to operate near several airports and stations in Beijing. The billing price is the same as that of taxis. However, there are actually many discounts, so I don't think about getting back the money.

Due to changes in the world line, the newly released autonomous driving classification method is more stringent than the original world line. L3 is a fully autonomous driving level and can participate in traffic without the driver's manual input.

Xin'an is currently the only company in China that produces L3-certified cars. However, to be cautious, it will first conduct trial operations in the form of driverless taxis. These test vehicles will gradually increase the difficulty of the test environment. After thoroughly confirming that autonomous driving is reliable, Xin'an will launch models for sale. .

At the same time, it also leaves time for Xin'an to reduce related technology costs. The current investment in applying L3 technology is still too high, especially the 14nm process chips produced at the base, which cannot be purchased from outside.

However, there is still plenty of time, relevant legislation is still being supplemented and discussed, and there is still a lot of controversy about L3 autonomous vehicles in China. The main issue is how much responsibility car companies should bear in determining liability for traffic accidents.

It is impossible not to bear the responsibility at all, but it seems biased to bear it completely. Even if it is fully assumed, there will be problems in determining responsibility.

Suppose that a self-driving vehicle makes a mistake in judgment and kills a person. If the car company is solely responsible, financial compensation for the victim will definitely be necessary, but who will bear the criminal liability?

AI certainly cannot go to jail, and car owners will not bear responsibility. It is not reliable for car companies to push out one or two management or technical personnel, and it is absolutely impossible to arrest them all.

But if a subjective error results in someone being killed and only having to pay compensation, does that mean there is a huge loophole in the law and a crisis of trust in autonomous driving?

In the long run, AI cannot always be reliable or error-free, so how to solve this problem is extremely difficult. Zhang Siren's guess is not big, and there will definitely be no results in two or three years.

Prior to this, car companies could only make large investments in L2, or they might hard-register L3 autonomous driving as L2++++ to transfer the risk to users.

At that time, some L2s can only assist driving in a disciplined manner, and some L2s can even help you get through traffic jams and rush left and right during the peak period of Beijing's Second Ring Road without any damage, but the regulations will appear vague.

Zhang Siren felt extremely headache when he thought of so many problems in the future.

The only good thing is that these troubles belong to the "disease of wealth", and they were not something that could be desired before.

…

Hefei.

Ai Quan and others have been with the EAST team for about two months, and the two teams get along quite well.

The talents who work on Big Mushroom are naturally experts in controllable nuclear fusion technology. Even if they cannot be leaders, they are still qualified mainstays and are very helpful to research.

Nuclear scientists who are also engaged in peaceful technology have grown rapidly after absorbing relevant weapons design principles. They are not unfamiliar at all and have come up with many valuable ideas.

During this period, what the two groups did most was to study controllable nuclear fusion. To be precise, they hoped to find ways to improve the conversion rate through in-depth research on the fusion mechanism.

The mainstream hydrogen bomb design uses deuterium-tritium fusion, with a reaction conversion rate of only 0.7%, and only a very small part of the material participates in the reaction.

If this number is increased to 7%, then the mass of a megaton-yield hydrogen bomb will drop sharply to about ten kilograms, which is only the size of a suitcase.

However, a super nuclear bomb with a yield of 200 million tons does not dare to hope to achieve this level. A group of scientists made bold assumptions and after considering several configurations of nuclear combinations, they only dared to initially set the target at 2% to 3%. But in fact, as long as If it can exceed 1%, it can be regarded as an important breakthrough in the field of nuclear weapons.

The two parties have actually made no progress so far. They have only proposed several relatively novel solutions in theory. However, at a glance, you can tell that the potential is limited:

Because most of the plans have been blown up in the last century, the good and bad ones are roughly known.

Yu Min has been recharging his energy. In his words, he "needs to wait for the opportunity," and this opportunity is the experiment.

Today they have just received a new task: to discuss and study the lunar hydrogen bomb test explosion plan and try to get inspiration for a new configuration of hydrogen bomb.

Why get inspiration from an old hydrogen bomb? Is it special just because it exploded on the moon?

Of course this is not the case. Hydrogen bombs have been exploded in a vacuum. The general results of the lunar nuclear explosion will not be beyond expectations for experts. Otherwise, all the nuclear tests in the last century would have been in vain.

What’s special is a specialty on the moon: helium-3.

It serves as the ideal third-generation controllable nuclear fusion fuel because neutrons are not released during fusion and the reaction rate is astonishingly high, with a theoretical limit of 70%!

This is almost 100 times that of deuterium and tritium fusion, and is obviously the easiest breakthrough to open.