Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Yup. Robot vacuum cleaner! That was the first project Chen Jin planned on doing for his start-up business. In fact, he had already decided to develop robot vacuum cleaners like Wa-Wah on Earth a long time ago. He would then sell the robot vacuums to thousands of families, saving the housewives from doing endless house chores. A very promising market prospect indeed!
The truth was, it didn’t require advanced technology to build robot vacuum cleaners; there was already a great number of products like that on Earth, forming a fairly mature market. But it was just civil technology, nothing high tech.
So Chen Jin chose to start with the industry that had relatively “easier requirements,” and launch the “killer robot vacuum” that was capable of keeping the floor sparkly clean with much better cleaning features, leaving the rest of the robot vacuums in the dust.
For instance, Wa-Wah cleaned his bedroom at least 10 times a day. It kept the room so clean that anyone with OCD would feel utterly comfortable in there; likewise, anyone without OCD would leave his room with a slowly growing OCD habit. No one would be able to find even the tiniest grain of dust; it was just as clean as a dust-free laboratory.
Would any other robot vacuum cleaner in the market be able to do that? Absolutely not!
Another example that made the most significant difference was that most of the robot vacuums in the market only did sweeping here and there, making sure all the corners in the house were taken care of; it was like cows plowing on rice fields, moving all over the place without paying attention to the areas that required cleaning the most.
On the other hand, Wa-Wah wouldn’t just sweep around the house like it was plowing on fields; what was good about it was that it would detect the dirtiest area, focus on it, and “take care of it” until it was as good as the cleanest spot in the house. Intellectually, Wa-Wah had never seen a set of taillights.
“Come, Wa-Wah. Let’s do a little test. We’ll have Alice scan you and see if she can analyze the technology that designed you.” Chen Jin picked it up and walked towards the bathroom.
In the bathroom, the round portal that had a diameter of 1 meter and was always sitting above the toilet tank was not the same as before. It was no longer hiding behind the shower curtain, because Chen Jin had installed a toughened glass sliding door (with one side painted black and the other reflective material) in the metal house on the other side of the portal. He’d taught himself some renovation skills and built a wooden mirror frame around the portal, hanging it on the wall behind the toilet.
Once the sliding door was closed, the old floating, semi-transparent portal would then look just like an ordinary mirror on the wall. Anyone that walked in there wouldn’t notice anything unusual, even if he got close to the “mirror” and touched it. Unless someone had nothing else better to do and decided to smash it with a hammer, no one would find anything strange about his bathroom. The portal had become a mirror. His secrets were now safer than ever.
But deep down, Chen Jin knew that no matter how well he concealed it, it was still not entirely safe, as the portal was not movable. And his mother could come into his room any time, even though she rarely did so. He needed to come up with a more reliable solution to completely remove this problem.
“First of all, I must make Haierfa mine. My property, all mine! It doesn’t matter if it gets exposed in the future or not. I’ll kill whoever tries to come through the portal and steal my stuff or even takes over the planet! I’ll kill them all! Or, I can steadily build up my security level, make a lot of money, and become a super tycoon. I’ll have power and territory, then I’ll buy the entire Happiness Court, and arrange 1,000 robots to guard the Court, keeping unauthorized people away and my secrets safe.”
So, whether it was on Earth or Haierfa, for the sake of his secrets, Chen Jin knew he had to do his very best to make money, gain fame, or even pick up trash in the other world, to get to the very end of his path of success.
Because only then, only when you’ve become a man of power and strength, would you be able to protect anything that belonged to you; worrying about this and that all day long would never help you keep anything.
He pushed open the sliding door, bent over, picked up Wa-Wah, and went through the portal. From the other world, he closed the black painted door. The portal was still quite unnoticeable, or very well camouflaged, even from the bedroom on the second floor of the metal house.
…
After scanning Wa-Wah with an X-Ray and radar sensor, Chen Jin couldn’t help but ask Alice, “So, what do you think, Alice? Can we produce more robot vacuum cleaners like Wa-Wah with our capsule factories and current technology?”
“I’m afraid not, Master. We’re not yet capable of producing such robot vacuum cleaners like Wa-Wah with our current skill and supplies, even though it was designed with outdated technology from over 100 years ago.” Artificial Intelligence Alice explained, “We need at least three more critical skills to build a robot like that. First, the technology to produce high-efficiency batteries. Wa-Wah runs on a high-efficiency battery that weighs 500 gram, which was made with highly advanced nano-enhanced materials; not only does it have excellent stability, but magnificent energy density as well. Once connected with the power of 2 kWh, the density is the equivalent of gasoline with the same weight. However, burning gasoline only brings out 50-60% energy utilization. For high-efficiency batteries, on the other hand, the energy utilization efficiency is usually higher than 90%. Therefore, it would be perfectly safe to say that the energy density of the said batteries is much higher than gasoline.”
Alice continued to explain, “Second, the technology for smart chip manufacturing is needed. There is a smart chip the size of a beer cap on Wa-Wah’s motherboard; it is a combination of CPU and NPU. In addition, the clock rate of the graphene-made CPU can go up to 100ghz, and there were one billion neurons in the neural network for the dual-core NPU (140 billion neurons for a human brain). Intellectually, Wa-Wah has the brain of a 10-year-old child, possessing the ability to learn as humans do. Needless to say, a chip like this was considered low tech on Haierfa, but even then, the capsule factories for automotive industry weren’t advanced enough for these chips; not even the silicone ones that had become obsolete. They required much more cutting-edge technology.”
There was no way Chen Jin could produce chips like that unless they found the capsule factories designed for this kind of production.
“Third, we need materials and technology. Wa-Wah was made with all sorts of high-performance materials, which had corrosion resistance, extreme-temperatures resistance, and the capability of killing all the microorganisms on surfaces, avoiding any possible contact with poisonous or harmful substances to help robot vacuum cleaners remain functional. For instance, the two seemingly insignificant continuous tracks underneath the cleaner are actually capable of resisting the heat of up to 3,000 degrees. In addition, even after decades of work, Wa-Wah could still function perfectly with only a few parts that are slightly worn out. In short, this ordinary robot vacuum cleaner is really not ordinary at all.”
After Alice explained all that, Chen Jin shook his head with his mouth somewhat opened. There is absolutely no way I could take this back to Earth with me. The people here were years ahead of us in the technology race. I mean, just look at this simple robot vacuum cleaner!
On the other hand, he was only planning on building the kind of robot vacuum cleaners that would keep floors tidy and dirt-free; he didn’t care much about everything else in terms of battery life or materials, or the intelligent chips for CPU and NPU. So, all he had to do was change the ways the robot vacuums worked through the computing methods on their system software, which would make them not as intelligent, but smarter than the ones on Earth.
“Alice, here’s your assignment. Design a robot vacuum cleaner that works just as well as Wa-Wah, but with the most ordinary materials, lithium-ion batteries, and silicon chips using the technology from 200 years ago. Can you do such a thing within a few days, Alice?”
Combining both Earth’s current technology and the advantages of the software on Haierfa, Chen Jin had decided to develop a kind of robot vacuum cleaner that was slightly smarter than the ones on Earth.
“No problem, Master. I will finish it in three days,” Alice responded with confidence. The motherboard, CPU (smart chips, actually), and RAM that were all dismantled before to solve the power shortage problem had all been reinstalled, increasing 98% of her performance, with a clock rate that could go up to 98 billion GHz. Designing a simple robot vacuum cleaner with the technology from 200 years ago was too easy for her.
“Perfect!” Chen Jin nodded. This AI Alice was impressively amazing.