Use the big move

Professor Zhang's audacious move filled Lin Yuan with both surprise and delight.

His delight stemmed not only from finding a way to acquire computing resources but also from the excitement of engaging in North America 'wild-field operations'.

Lin Yuan recalled the unique sorrow he felt as a youth in junior and senior high school history classes when he delved into modern history. Although this sorrow gradually faded under the surrounding currents, it was eventually sealed away until he donned the 'yellow robe'.

But at this moment, those emotions seemed to be rekindled.

Lin Yuan felt that what he was about to do was the right thing; he even had a faint sense of mission. He was going to severely deplete the enemy's resources.

However, despite his excitement, Lin Yuan was not without worries. Because doing so inevitably involved risks.

If he were truly caught, how could he prove his ardent patriotism? This was what worried Lin Yuan.

Even with his mentor's guarantee, Lin Yuan's little heart was still a bit flustered.

Excitement and fear intertwined into the thrill of adventure, which was far more stimulating than fabricating an admission letter by hand. He ultimately couldn't resist this temptation.

— —

The next day happened to be Saturday. Lin Yuan woke up early, went to the cafeteria for breakfast, bought four steamed buns, and then stopped by the supermarket for two bottles of 'happy water'. He didn't plan to go out for lunch.

Professor Zhang had forwarded him a large number of emails last night. Judging by the dates, the earliest ones were nearly two years old.

These emails were, without exception, invitations to various conferences. The organizers were diverse, covering various fields: AI, microelectronics, edge computing, purely academic discussions, and so on.

His mentor subtly indicated, "You can search more within these. Some conferences are purely for inviting people to have fun; you can follow the vine to find various organizations on the same line."

Lin Yuan had previously heard in the news that some high-end conferences used the pretext of participation fees to bribe attendees.

Connecting this with what his mentor had told him last night: "In those years, many foreign-funded institutions particularly liked to invest effort in highly educated young people like us." Lin Yuan naturally thought that these conferences were very likely still playing the same old tricks, only the methods were probably more covert now.

Fortunately, there is a lot of publicly available information on the internet nowadays. The opposing side across the Pacific can even find relevant documents regarding their 1.6 billion dollar "special fund" on their own government websites.

The companies to which these conference organizers belong, their equity structures, and shareholder lists can all be found online.

Although there are still covert operations like nominee shareholding in the commercial sphere, commercial activities inevitably leave traces. Over time, with more traces left, clues will naturally emerge.

Moreover, many people in the internet age share a common flaw: they love to show off.

Many shocking events that startled the nation or even the world, causing jaws to drop, originated merely because some simpleton posted something on a social media platform, or from a minor repair of a key official's laptop.

Lin Yuan naturally thought of using the names of these conference organizers and the names of the holding companies behind them found online, as well as the names of the various conferences they organized, to search on various social media platforms, especially those platforms where teachers and students from prestigious schools love to show off. Perhaps he could find some clues.

Lin Yuan even considered university BBS forums and overseas social media platforms.

Such a massive data retrieval workload could naturally not be completed by him alone. However, data retrieval is the most common form of computation. And the computing power system is best at computation.

Lin Yuan only needed to build the data pathways for the computing power system, just as he did when collecting merchant data.

The computing power system is incredibly powerful when strong, but incredibly clumsy when weak.

For example: if you give the system information about a certain conference, the system has no idea how to find the organizer behind the conference because it doesn't know where to look. Then Lin Yuan needs to help the system find the organizer of this conference and then link the system to the entry point of the enterprise information inquiry platform—a certain 'Eye Check' platform.

After that, the system will know where to look up enterprise information, and then follow the vine to retrieve all the associated connections along the entire path.

Subsequently, the system will use the retrieved conference association information to search for data at the various social media platform entry points specified by Lin Yuan.

It can be said that what the system is best at is retrieval.

As long as Lin Yuan builds the data pathways, all data along those pathways can be retrieved by the system.

The only trouble with this process is the consumption of computing power.

Computing power was a persistent problem for Lin Yuan, but fortunately, the consumption for this type of retrieval was a one-time investment, so Lin Yuan decided to grit his teeth and squeeze some out.

But what almost made him grind his molars was the system's estimated computing power consumption: complete depletion.

"Each large-scale data retrieval will deplete the currently accumulated computing power."

Lin Yuan was furious, "You're doing this on purpose, aren't you? Using a big move requires empty mana, right? What other settings do you have that I don't know about?"

"I'm too disdainful to call you 'System'; I'll just call you 'Old 6' instead."

Since the currently accumulated computing power was depleted to only 266P, and the matter at hand was already an arrow on the bowstring that had to be released, Lin Yuan gritted his teeth and initiated the data retrieval.

Anyway, after formal enrollment, there would be a computing power income when the enrollment task was settled.

However, seeing "Accumulated Computing Power: 0P" on the system panel, Lin Yuan was still a bit flustered. So he had no choice but to grit his teeth and 'sell himself' to the system for 100P of computing power.

"Accumulated Computing Power: 100P," in case of unexpected needs at a critical moment.

Fortunately, Lin Yuan was young and healthy, and this process of 'selling his essence' did not have much impact on him; instead, it allowed him to achieve a "super sage state" of single-mindedness.

From this perspective, Lin Yuan suddenly felt: Could this be the system's painstaking effort? Just so I can focus on my personal struggles and not care about those frivolous things.

Even with the system's retrieval, facing such a massive amount of data, it took over ten minutes to complete.

Lin Yuan finally got the results he wanted.

The first item in the system's retrieved results list, marked with a 99.99% suspiciousness level, was a comment under a certain post on the overseas social media platform Facebook.

The system had thoughtfully already translated the content.

The original intention of the post was to discuss: For less experienced teachers and students, where can one get cheap computing resources?

The comments below the post were almost uniformly complaining about the high cost of NVIDIA computing cards, and also complaining about miners inflating graphics card prices. Some also grumbled about accidentally buying refurbished mining cards disguised as second-hand graphics cards, and wanted to 'greet' the miners' 'chrysanthemums' severely.

Lin Yuan could empathize with this, as he himself was facing this very problem.

The comment singled out by the system was actually very short: "Who would have thought I'd put that data on an OCR device for computation? Not only did I save on equipment costs, but I also received a certain quota of free computing power. lol~~"

From the respondent's words, he was very proud. It gave the impression that he had easily obtained computing equipment without spending any money.

Lin Yuan's previous understanding of "OCR" was: Optical Character Recognition. But here, it obviously didn't mean that; it clearly referred to a certain organization.

The key to understanding this comment obviously lay in the explanation of the term "OCR."

"System, what is OCR here?"

"OCR, full name: Open Computing Republic, headquartered in North America, with a branch office in HK. The organization's motto: To make computing accessible, to make computing equitable."

Lin Yuan pondered slightly, 'That's the flavor.' Computing power is not something everyone needs to use, yet they insist on attaching an 'equitable' label to it. And 'Republic' can mean a republic. It definitely has that NGO vibe.

But the system did not provide too much detailed information. Lin Yuan was already used to this system setting—all retrieval depends on data pathways.

Fortunately, the system's help was already sufficient; Lin Yuan could complete the rest on his own.

To clarify, this is not a mindless cheat. Instead, everything relies on existing public network data for data analysis. For example: many excellent political bloggers actually don't have any internal reference materials, but they can predict the direction of international affairs based on public information, combined with geopolitical and historical data. For example: a certain big shot who predicted the decoupling of the East and West coasts of the Pacific early on, had already predicted it on a show when both sides were in their honeymoon period. Many such examples can be found. The protagonist's system's data retrieval is essentially also this kind of ability, and not so IMBA that it can peer into all information in the world. This is hereby explained.