Simulation: Great Power Technology

Ye Zhou raised his head, he saw a small sign on the wall of this operating room—or the laboratory, and on the sign was a word written in Chinese:

Heavenly eye.

Looking closer, Ye Zhou realized that in front of him was an extremely complicated and somewhat comical operating table.

It is complicated because in addition to the operating table, shadowless lamp and other vital signs monitoring instruments of the scene, there are many other monitoring units set up next to this operating table, and the screens of these monitoring units are full of Ye Zhou complete Incomprehensible symbols and data.

And it's funny because it's not a human being lying on the operating table, but a fat cat grinning and sticking out his tongue, who has apparently been put down by anesthesia.

If Ye Zhou didn't know that this simulation was related to the aes system, he would probably think that this was the scene of some high-end cat sterilization operation.

"Is the optic nerve signal sensor connected?"

The question from the middle-aged doctor next to him pulled Ye Zhou back from his thoughts. He looked around in confusion and was about to answer when another young doctor who seemed to be specializing in operating the monitoring system opened the mouth and said:

"Connected, everything is ready to go."

"Okay, then get ready to wake up. Ye Zhou, wake up the cat."

"Ah? Me? How do I wake up?"

"...Do whatever you want, just let it open its eyes anyway."

Hearing this, Ye Zhou reluctantly stretched out his hand and tentatively rubbed the cat's stomach on the operating table, but the other party didn't respond, and even twitched comfortably.

After hesitating for a moment, Ye Zhou increased the strength in his hand and squeezed one of the front paws of the cat on the operating table. After a while, the cat finally opened its eyes leisurely.

Probably because the effect of the anesthesia has not yet passed, the cat's eyes wandered around, but his body was still limp. The middle-aged doctor on the side saw this scene and quickly said:

"Okay, just wake up. Ye Zhou, bring the picture album next to you."

Ye Zhou turned his head and saw that on the table next to the operating table was a pile of picture albums, and those picture albums were all filled with various shapes, dots, and a few objects that existed in reality.

As the memory flow continued to flow in, Ye Zhou finally understood the purpose of this so-called operation, or the experiment, and his role in this experiment.

This is the legendary cat brain optic nerve experiment. In the 1960s, this experiment led by Chou Guo revealed several major problems in the biological visual system and won two Nobel Prizes for these discoveries.

In this experiment, the researchers found that the visual cells in the visual cortex are divided into three categories, responsible for simple, complex and ultra-complex visual signal processing, and also began to realize that human visual processing starts from simple large cells.

That is to say, humans first learn to recognize the edges and corners of things, and then they begin to learn a series of deep content such as color, light and shade, and background distinction.

This theory laid the foundation for subsequent machine vision research. It can even be said that the most critical step for humans to achieve "artificial vision" is from here.

And now, Ye Zhou's role is to be an assistant in this experiment.

Seeing the serious look on the middle-aged doctor's face, Ye Zhou hurriedly put a fence around the cat's head to block his sight. Then, he raised the picture album on top of the cat's head, and another young doctor immediately began to record Activity signals from nerves in various locations in the cat's brain.

"Um... ok, this picture is ok, the next one."

"The response is not strong, what picture is this?"

Ye Zhou took a look at the album and replied:

"Abstract gouache—just a clutter of colors."

The young doctor gave him a strange look and said:

"This is 'color 002', can you look at the number on the back and describe it?"

Ye Zhou smiled a little embarrassedly, and continued to change the album in his hand according to his instructions.

"This is a good response, what is this?"

"It's line 004."

"Okay, line 004, record it first, wait and repeat the test a few times. The next one----measure the light and shade."

Ye Zhou selected the content that met the requirements from the picture book in his hand. After raising it to the top of the cat's head, the young doctor frowned slightly and replied:

"Slightly stronger than color, but limited in intensity, far less than lines. Go back to lines, start from simple to complex, and test them one by one."

"clear."

Ye Zhou replied neatly that as the experiment continued, his movements became more and more skilled, and he even began to have time to observe the changes of various curves and data on the display screen with the young doctor.

Just as the memory flowed to his input, in this experiment the cat's visual feedback strictly followed the order of intensity from lines, to light and shade, to color, while feedback on subjects in further complex contexts produced Gradient feedback delays of different sensory cells and nerves.

"80ms after the visual trigger, the visual signal will be reflected in the multivariate response pattern of the scalp, and after 300ms, the perception of the visual object begins to deviate from the feedforward visual object information and depends on the external background scene."

"From the time matrix, we set the visual trigger to 600ms for visual information decoding monitoring, and the results show that the perception accuracy peaks around 200ms."

"This is basically the same as the result we predicted earlier, which supports the conclusion."

After the young doctor finished speaking, the middle-aged doctor beside Ye Zhou nodded and replied:

"Then continue to test a few more times, and if the change is within the margin of error, start drawing conclusions."

The young doctor hummed and continued to focus on the results on the screen, but Ye Zhou was suddenly lost.

This conclusion seems a bit too simplistic.

Although it can be explained that they have conducted a lot of tests before this experiment, he always feels that under such a complex and sophisticated experiment, if only these two conclusions can be drawn, it seems that it is not the limit of this experiment.

He carefully looked at the historical data displayed on the screen. Although he didn't know the underlying principles, if he wanted to analyze the differences and laws, he was definitely better than anyone present with his talent as a "decision maker". Be strong.

He tried to continue changing the album in his hand, and the monitoring values ​​on the screen also kept changing. After repeating the cycle several times, Ye Zhou suddenly discovered a pattern.

Every time the screen is switched, the perceptual signal of the optic nerve will have a beating similar to a "double click".

And the more complex the picture, the more obvious the beating of the signal.

This is not at all a phenomenon that can be explained by the "three layers of visual cells" theory, because in each neural area, such beatings are synchronized.

Ye Zhou didn't know the reason, so he directly stated his findings. After hearing his analysis, the two doctors looked at the screen carefully, and finally nodded.

"Indeed... Ye Zhou is right. We have always regarded this kind of beating as a regular disturbance before, but now it seems that there should be some kind of cause for this kind of beating."

"The regularity of the beating is too strong... Could it be that every nerve cell has two sets of perception units?"

"Continue to test, test with complex pictures!"

Hearing the doctor's words, Ye Zhou hurriedly picked up the picture album in his hand, and the experiment that had already ended at the end was restarted, but this time, what they were about to face was a brand new phenomenon.

"It can be determined that the signal beats in the same area should come from the same nerve cell."

"Then our previous theories may need to be further refined, not only for cell layering, but also for the layering of individual nerve cells."

"I think it's quite possible that hypercomplex perception is not done by clusters of cells, but by individual cells."

"Is it possible that each cell will be divided into two parts? One part is responsible for feeling and the other part is responsible for integration? We have to continue to test..."

Listening to his words, Ye Zhou was about to answer, but the picture in front of him gradually darkened.

This stage of the simulation is over again.

But the simulation continued, which made Ye Zhou relieved, because it meant that, until now, he had not done anything wrong.