Chapter 868: Projects

The second of his research projects was first intended as part of the first as it was related to the small ants he was using to do Arborist work. Rather than requiring the close care of an Arborist over long periods of time to shape plants with Array Symbols as they grew, small ants were used to do the same thing. Each ant was far from being smart or capable enough to know how to form a complete symbol on their own, but using Ancestral Memories they were able to raise a colony with the ability to collectively form a single symbol. Then, caretakers only needed to indicate the positions of each array symbol upon the growing plants and the respective ant colonies would respond to their specific scent marker and do their job.

After the initial location was marked, ants place their own pheromone trails which they use to guide those of their colony to the proper locations. A weapon might require thirty symbols, but only twelve unique symbols. To this end twelve giant colonies were all that was necessary as they’d handle multiple symbols on each weapon and work on a field of hundreds of ‘weapon trees’ at the same time.

This first project was constantly being improved upon, with the goal to merge two different schools of thought together. They had already been able to incorporate certain resources obtained from Demonic Beasts and Insects into these growing trees. For a Blacksmith, things like claws, teeth, hides, scales, and horns would require treatment in the Qi powered flames of the Blacksmith before they could be incorporated into metals and their power absorbed into the weapon. Arborists on the other hand used these materials as fertilizer, and there was a careful balance of certain types of plants that were used which had the right abilities to draw sustenance from each specific type of animal material. This was further compounded when trying to combine different materials and required specially grafting different plants together to reach a specific end result.

The two professions created Magical Tools in a similar way. First, they removed the impurities from special materials. Then, Array Symbols were placed upon them. There were of course far more subtleties involved and the methods they used for these two steps were very different. They spent time trying to combine and improve the first step of the process, but they were so different that they didn’t make much progress. There was no telling whether it was a special property of Demonic Beasts, Earth Flames, or the rules of this world, but somehow the hard parts of Demonic Beasts, like horns, teeth, claws, bones, and even antlers could be heated till they reached a molten state and manipulated as if they were metal. Blacksmiths then hammered and shaped these materials and could even combine them together like alloys before carving symbols into them. Arborists on the other hand used these materials as fertilizer, crushing them down into a powder-like state and then using them like soil to grow plants. They carefully tended these plants to shape their growth into the form of Magical Tools.

They made little progress on combining the basic methods of these two professions, but there were some improvements they had found related to the Qi Techniques used to empower and assist these two processes. Unfortunately, these methods were mostly useful for the Professionals of each path and not very helpful for the automated methods that Sage’s research project was focused upon. On the plus side there was a little improvement on the second part of this process. The Spirit Carver and Anima Print techniques that Sage used long ago to carve Array Symbols as both a Blacksmithing and Formation Master were very simplistic techniques. After getting access to great knowledge from the Cult of the Woodlord and Holy Flame Sect he realized there were much more detailed and precise techniques. He also learned that these sorts of techniques were also the greatest secrets of the highest level Professionals. They passed down these family or school secrets to their disciples and used them to compete with the other great craftspeople. The knowledge he had access to was high level but it did not include these sorts of secrets, it mostly consisted of the specifics of high level materials and not the secret techniques to manipulate them. So, from the Holy Flame Sect he learned where and how to find these materials, the temperatures or special flames needed to work with them, and to what ratios they could be combined with other materials. The knowledge from the Cult of the Woodlord was quite similar, but dealt with how to break down these materials and what types of plants they were best with rather than temperatures.

While he didn’t have access to the secret techniques for these Professions, there were a handful of higher level techniques for each Profession. The research teams had found ways to combine some of them to form more complicated techniques, but they’d also found ways to simplify them. One of them was actually simplified enough that it could be performed by the colonies of insects and improved the accuracy of their large scale Arborist project. Seeing some success in this regard, more researchers turned their attention to this avenue working on simplifying techniques used to create array symbols. Others worked towards a similar avenue, making the ants more capable of complicated activities.

This same route of thought had already occurred to Sage long ago, but for a different reason. He’d long ago had the idea of building something very unusual: a biocomputer.

Electricity did not function like it did on Earth in this world. He’d already found it impossible to create an electric motor because of this same problem. That meant there was no way for him to create a computer in the manner that he was familiar with. Of course, even if electricity did function in the same way there was no way he would know how to build the type of computer he was used to. He didn’t even know how to construct a vacuum tube or a cathode ray tube, let alone the more complicated resistors, transistors, or capacitors. There was definitely no way he was going to be able to replicate a microprocessor. He might have once been a Computer Programmer, but he always dealt entirely with software. While the degree might have the words ‘Computer Science’ upon them, microprocessors fell under the umbrella of electrical or electronic engineering. Chip Designer was a long way off from Software Developer.

That said, he did have a few courses on the basic principles of a computer and that rough knowledge was what he was using to guide him. At its core, a computer ran upon something called the Arithmetic Logic Unit, or ALU. In essence, it took two values, then performed a comparison or simple mathematical operation on them and output a result. It could usually add, subtract, multiply, or divide(though binary division seemed to be a huge topic). As for comparisons it would tell which value was larger or if they were equal. Then, it sent the result to the accumulator. The accumulator was… a fancy name for the output.

At the base level it was pretty much just a calculator that used binary. What made it into a computer was the addition of two parts, data storage and the control unit. There are many levels of memory in modern computers with multiple types of fast caches, ram, and hard drives. Without a way to store data there would be no way to do complicated multi-part calculations or operations. The control unit, along with a clock, was the final step to make things into a computer. The control unit managed the instructions that were sent to the arithmetic logic unit and their timing.

In a greatly simplified conceptualization of a computer, the control unit filled an instruction register with an operation to do, the arithmetic logic unit performed the operation, and then the result got sent back into data storage. There were many thousands of complications and optimizations between this simple idea and the functioning of a personal computer, but he was only concerned with reproducing the basics in a biological form.

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