I Play Dungeons in the Police Station

Chapter 450 - 269: Does Li Xiang Have Artificial Intelligence?

Sun Zheng was being modest. He didn’t think there was a more professional team in the field of facial recognition in the country than theirs. Only through comparison can the excellence of a product be highlighted.

An old saying goes, whether one’s product is good or not depends entirely on the contrast with peers.

Li Zhongqing handed the USB drive with the compressed file to Sun Zheng, who then gave it to Xiaowang, saying, "Xiaowang, test this facial recognition system."

"Yes."

Xiaowang opened the compressed file. Seeing its mere 100 M size, he didn’t think much of it.

After opening it, the familiar screen and UI interface made Sun Zheng couldn’t help but complain, "Isn’t this just the old version brought over to muddle through?"

Li Zhongqing was overwhelmingly familiar with the old version of the facial recognition system. Upon seeing the icon and interface, he also had doubts, wondering if Li Xiang had sent the wrong software.

Did he directly send the old version?

"The old version was more than 300 MB; this one is only over 100 MB. It must have been trimmed."

Upon hearing Xiaowang’s words, Sun Zheng shook his head. Initially, he had some interest in this facial recognition system that caught Director Li’s attention, but now he had none.

He couldn’t fathom who had the guts to use this software to fool Director Li. They were going to have a tough time ahead.

"Should we still test it?"

Xiaowang asked uncertainly.

"Since it’s installed, let’s test it."

At this moment, Li Zhongqing, holding onto the last bit of trust in Li Xiang, decided to give it a try.

"Yes."

Xiaowang clicked to start the test. The software ran normally, and both the smoothness and reaction speed were beyond everyone’s expectations.

Seeing this, the smile on Sun Zheng’s face vanished, and he stared intently at the flashing photos on the computer screen.

"The recognition efficiency..."

Even Li Zhongqing, who didn’t understand software very well, was astonished by the results.

Likewise, in just half an hour, the comparison results came out.

According to the similarity percentage, arranged from high to low, the top-ranked photo had a similarity as high as 95%, which was exactly the person they were looking for.

"Professor Sun, the test is over. The testing efficiency compared to the old version improved by 1000 percentage points. How is this possible?"

Upon seeing the results, Xiaowang was initially shocked.

"And I think this is not the limit of the software. The photos we chose were not much different from those in the database. If the person’s appearance changes with age, it would really test the limits of the facial recognition system."

"Continue testing. Let’s try an old photo."

"Yes."

The test continued, and this time they increased the difficulty by directly using a black-and-white old photo for the system to recognize.

Yet, the system’s response speed remained swift. In just an hour, it provided over a hundred similar photos, still ranked by similarity from high to low.

There was no need for manual comparison of the test photos as people had already been selected, so Xiaowang immediately recognized that the person ranked tenth with a similarity of 81% was their target.

This efficiency was terrifying.

"The test is over. The efficiency of this software improved by 1400 percentage points compared to the old version."

"How is that possible? How is that possible?"

Sun Zheng was flustered. This test result was too exaggerated, right?

It directly overshadowed the research achievements he was proud of, shattering his inner pride.

"Director Li, who developed this software? You must tell me."

"Actually, you know this person too."

"I also know?"

Sun Zheng thought for a while but couldn’t figure out who among the people he knew could develop a facial recognition system that surpassed his by such a margin.

If there was, he would certainly know.

"Yes, you do know. It’s Li Xiang, who developed the digital cranial reconstruction technology last time."

"It’s him? Didn’t he just complete the development of the digital cranial reconstruction technology? How did he manage to make such a significant cross-disciplinary breakthrough so quickly?"

Sun Zheng felt a bit aggrieved. He knew Li Xiang’s name, and the cranial reconstruction software had shocked him greatly at the time. But he always thought Li Xiang was an expert in cranial reconstruction, unlikely to threaten them in the field of facial recognition. Yet, he didn’t expect this day to come so soon.

Moreover, he came directly with a finished product, catching him completely off guard.

"I’m also very surprised, but there’s more shock to come. Can you guess how long it took him to optimize this facial recognition system?"

"Two months?"

Sun Zheng guessed that Li Xiang had been working on optimizing facial recognition technology since completing the cranial reconstruction software, which would mean about two months. This speed was astonishing; their institute had spent a year researching this software.

Li Zhongqing shook his head, held up one finger, and said, "One week."

"What? One week? How is that possible?" Sun Zheng felt more shocked today than he had been all year.

Such an incredible piece of software, completed in just one week—he couldn’t believe it. "Director Li, I work in software engineering. Don’t fool me. How could this be developed in just a week? How many people are there in his team? Not many, and even with many, it couldn’t be done."

Sun Zheng couldn’t comprehend; it was as if his CPU was about to burn out.

He couldn’t understand how a human could achieve this.

"He’s just one person. However, I helped him get a week’s access to the Shenwei supercomputer. Shenwei reported that it had been running at full capacity the entire week, to the point they worried it might not handle the load," Li Zhongqing chuckled, thinking Shenwei was overreacting. Supercomputers have computing redundancy, and running at full capacity for a while shouldn’t pose any issues.

"A supercomputer was used?"

Sun Zheng thought of something and said to Li Zhongqing, "Director Li, there’s something I’d like to ask of you."

"Go ahead, Professor Sun, no need for formalities between us."

"I’ll be straightforward. This software is excellent, just like the previous digital cranial reconstruction software. It likely contains an AI program embedded. Artificial Intelligence is the current mainstream development direction in the world, and Li Xiang developing this software in a week is suspicious. I suspect he has a complete AI system; otherwise, it’s hard to explain how he achieved this."

"What did you say? Li Xiang has an AI program? That seems unlikely."

Upon hearing Sun Zheng’s words, Li Zhongqing initially thought it made sense, but then dismissed it as impossible, "AI research is not something small workshops can achieve. Every company involved in AI is worth billions. How could Li Xiang develop AI by himself?"

"I have a way to verify whether he has AI,"

Sun Zheng was incredulous that a private individual could have an AI system, but there seemed no other way to explain Li Xiang’s achievements.

"What way?"

"By checking whether the code he wrote was his or was generated by an AI."

"Then let’s have a look."

Li Zhongqing also wanted to know if Li Xiang indeed had AI.

Upon getting Li Zhongqing’s consent, Sun Zheng immediately decompiled the compressed file from the USB drive to look into Li Xiang’s code.

Li Xiang’s code was meticulously clean, with no annotations at all. Generally, people looking at his code would find it incomprehensible.

Even Sun Zheng found some parts hard to understand.

At this moment, he could only brace himself and examine the code line by line to find any patterns.

"Director Li, I can confirm 100% that Li Xiang indeed used AI to optimize this software. The arrangement of code within it shows evident machine syntax."

Curiously, Li Zhongqing asked, "How can you tell?"