This was the first thing David said to Xiang Shan after he returned to the office in despair.
The Engineering Research Center is now very empty. Over the past few months, people who wanted to leave have been leaving one after another. The team has shrunk a lot, and many project teams have been directly merged. Many technical staff with military backgrounds have
Begin to fill the lowest-level vacancies. These technicians are not scholars and rarely do research work, but after a period of training, they are enough to undertake the tasks that ordinary scientific researchers need to undertake.
The remaining scholars will also be automatically upgraded.
This is a huge benefit for Xiang Shan. With his age and qualifications, he would not have been able to obtain a position of this level. After he returns to China, he can directly obtain the rank of assistant researcher and can directly wait for the review of associate researcher.
If he works here for a few years and makes some achievements, even this step can be skipped.
In the Republic, scholars who can obtain this professional title before the age of thirty are said to have "a bright future."
But for Xiang Shan, the biggest advantage of this "unusual promotion" is that it is more convenient to research. Many materials that were inconvenient to obtain before can now be browsed directly.
But even so, the information in his hand is still not as "timely" as David's.
Xiangshan remembered that these two days were the time when the Rama Project disassembled the only complete alien machine. Obviously, it is impossible to put this kind of thing in a large auditorium and then disassemble it in full view of the public. This is also true.
Not realistic.
Although the process of taking this thing apart must be very ceremonial, not all scholars can see it at the first time. Now Xiangshan does not have this ability.
Xiangshan could only take some of his researchers to continue sorting and studying the information on the wreckage.
Xiang Shan smiled at David and said, "What's wrong? Is there any surprising discovery?"
David and Xiangshan's desks were originally very close to each other. Now that a lot of people have left, this research center has three desks per person. It is said that when they are free, partitions will be made here to allow some scholars to have private office space.
.However, Xiang Shan and David are the kind of friends who can talk easily, so they just expanded their "territory" to pile up information and documents, but they still sat in the original place.
"I should have thought of it earlier. Those guys..." David stared at Xiang Shan, bloodshot eyes even appeared: "They use crappy scanners. They use tapes."
"What..." Xiang Shan was stunned.
"Tape." David repeated: "Those small robots in Ogun do not need to care about work efficiency at all, and the stored information does not need to be erased and written repeatedly. Those small robots do not use electronic scanners.
To identify signals... they most likely temporarily magnetize the surface of those copper plates to directly convert the symbols into specific magnetic signals and burn them on the tape. Its memory is a tape drive."
Xiang Shan was stunned: "But we found no trace of the tape outside..."
"Radiate." David whispered: "Certain polymer materials will deteriorate faster under the action of radiation. The mechanical remains outside the core area may have been there thousands or tens of thousands of years ago, and some
The metal parts are all stuck together due to transmutation. These things are not afraid of radiation, but polymer materials do not have such strong radiation resistance. When we entered, the tape base in the wreckage outside and the tape base of the polymer film disappeared
, even the magnetic material particles have been demagnetized. It took too long.”
"But the machine in the core area is different. Its belt base is made of aluminum alloy. Although it has been stuck together and cannot be separated, you can still roughly tell what it is."
Xiang Shan suddenly said: "Let me take a look... In other words... there are some mechanical structures of unknown meaning, maybe they are alien tape machines?"
In fact, even in the middle of the 21st century, people on earth are still using tapes.
On professional machines.
Tapes actually have a lower unit capacity cost than hard disks, higher stability, and lower requirements for storage environments. They can easily achieve long-term backup. In fact, with current human technology, a dedicated tape can
The capacity has easily exceeded 500TB.
However, tape is indeed inferior to disk. The modification and erasing of tape is indeed far inferior to that of disk. It can only perform linear reading.
And today's humans have indeed built professional machines with hundreds of tapes inserted inside at the same time.
"However, from a structural point of view, those small robots cannot insert a few tapes..." Xiang Shan found it difficult to accept: "Such a simple and rigid device cannot support complex artificial intelligence..."
"You can make up for it with time." David said: "You know...the last thing these guys lack is time."
One of the few disadvantages of tape is "speed". Things written on tape can only be read linearly.
If a tape is used to support an artificial intelligence, the time it takes to make some reactions may be quite long. It may take a long time for the machine to rewind the tape before it can find the preset response to the current situation.
But what the robots in Ogun lack most is time.
"I guess the tape head works like this..." David picked up a roll of transparent tape with an auxiliary device and scratched it on his desk. A line of tape was stuck to the table. David scratched his head
: "That's probably what it means. There should be a device to retract the tape. That's what it means..."
Xiang Shan took out an oil-based pen and wrote a few words on the table. Then he took the tape, scratched it on the table, and then peeled off the tape.
That line of words appeared on the tape.
"so?"
"Magnetize the area where a symbol is located, and use a tape to get close to it... The specific details may be a little different, but it is roughly the same principle." David said: "And in this process, there should be no direct connection between the tape and the surface of the copper plate.
The contact may be a few tenths of a millimeter apart. Otherwise, we will detect a large number of friction marks on the half surface. Well, it is also possible that the magnetic head induces the electromagnetic signal, and then converts it through a purely mechanical structure before recording it on the tape.
.”
Xiang Shan held his head: "You are right... it takes a long time to enter a symbol like this... but the most important thing they lack is time."
In Xiangshan's original impression, the black cabin at the core of Ogun should be like a honeycomb, with countless machines moving in and out quickly, working alternately, in an orderly manner, busy but not complicated.
But think about it carefully, why are these machines busy?
What they faced was a long journey ranging from tens of thousands of years to millions of years.
In the darkness, only a few magnetic heads were working slowly and steadily.