112: Chapter 112 The Bug That Doesn't Need a Brain

On June 25th, the Gaokao results were officially released.

At 8:29 PM that same evening, a newly registered Bilibili account uploaded its first video in the Tech section.

The account name was: Low Entropy Workshop.

The profile picture was an engineering drawing with white lines on a black background—a simplified linkage outline of a hexapod machine.

There was no bio.

The video title was just a single line.

"The Brainless Bug: Non-Periodic Passive Hexapod Platform V0"

Opening the video, only a rough text card with white characters on a black background appeared on the screen.

[It has no cameras.]

[No LiDAR.]

[No IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit).]

[No chips to plan gait or assess terrain.]

[A single 24V brushless DC motor only provides open-loop, slow, constant torque.]

[The rest is left entirely to the body.]

The next second, the screen lit up.

In the shot was an obstacle course pieced together from scrap plywood, industrial nylon blocks, high-density foam boards, and several pieces of scrap aluminum profiles with roughly cut edges.

The height differences of the obstacles were not exaggerated; the highest point was no more than six or seven centimeters.

However, the positions of all fulcrums, protrusions, and depressions intentionally broke the engineering aesthetics of equidistant arrangement.

It looked like a piece of concrete floor smashed at random with a sledgehammer, then forcibly glued back together with cheap adhesive.

Ugly, messy, and completely devoid of regularity.

In front of the obstacle course crouched a machine, sitting quietly.

A hexapod mechanical device about half a meter long.

It possessed no aesthetic sense of industrial design whatsoever.

The silver-gray 6061 aluminum profile skeleton was blatantly exposed.

On the central drive crankshaft, tool marks left by lathe machining were clearly visible.

Linkages, pre-loaded springs, rocker arms, pawls, brass bushings, and a bottom differential balance beam intertwined into a complex mass of metallic viscera.

It had no carbon fiber casing common in consumer robots, no breathing LEDs, and no biomimetic paint job.

It lacked any gimmicky elements that would immediately convey a sense of futurity in a commercial promo.

It looked more like a metallic arthropod insect that had self-assembled and crawled out of a hardware scrap pile in an urban village down south.

Crude and heavy-duty, it exuded an unadorned, primitive industrial feel.

Then, a faint click sounded in the video.

The power connected, the electronic speed controller emitted a soft chime, and the 24V low-speed high-torque brushless motor began to whine softly.

The central crankshaft began to rotate slowly.

The six legs lifted and lowered in sequence; pawls locked, and cams disengaged.

Clack.

Clack-clack.

Clack.

Its gait was extremely slow.

So slow that viewers accustomed to the fast pace of short videos would feel a visceral impatience.

With every step, through the high-definition lens, one could see the minute deformation of the aluminum linkages under stress, the spring compressing with effort, and the brief hesitation of the brass pawl at the edge of the rack.

Yet, it did not fall.

The first irregular scrap aluminum protrusion forcibly raised its front left leg.

The body merely made a faint metallic scraping sound and tilted less than five degrees to the right, as the differential balance beam at the bottom quickly distributed the potential energy, allowing the supporting legs on the right side to maintain a firm grip on the ground without hanging in the air as a result.

A sudden drop formed by the second foam board caused the fourth leg to briefly step into empty space.

The pre-loaded damping spring extended smoothly, gently guiding the leg into the bottom of the pit rather than letting that corner of the chassis crash down unsupported.

A third section of non-equidistant consecutive bumps followed in quick succession.

If a conventional uniform sixty-degree phase difference were used, such consecutive bumps would easily stack disturbances onto the same beat, running the risk of resonance, gear stripping, or gait overlap.

But this metal bug's six legs did not err in unison like an orderly honor guard.

In a posture that felt visually jarring—even somewhat comical and awkward—they fought individually, yet under the strict constraints of the mechanical structure, smoothly handed off the gravitational load.

Below the video frame, cold parameter subtitles appeared.

[Test Item: Low-speed traversal of non-periodic obstacle course.]

[Power Source: Pure DC electric drive, open-loop constant speed input; exaggerated power sources inconsistent with the physical reality of this scale, such as internal combustion engines, are prohibited.]

[Control Logic: No terrain recognition, no attitude closed-loop control, no sensor torque feedback.]

[Failure Conditions: Body rollover / continuous jam exceeding three seconds / failure to hand off load after a single leg loses load / abnormal pawl engagement / micro-cracks in main load-bearing structure.]

Off-screen, a young male voice spoke.

The voice was steady and flat, reading like a dry laboratory report rather than showcasing cutting-edge technology.

"Before we begin, let's clearly define what it is not."

"It is not an invention I fabricated out of thin air from scratch."

The camera cut to a scratched oak tabletop.

On a yellowed piece of scratch paper were three names from the history of mechanics:

Strandbeest.

RHex.

Rocker-bogie.

"Passive linkage walking mechanisms were built decades ago."

"Open-loop timing combined with compliant physical structures has been proven countless times in academia."

"Relying on rocker-bogie mechanisms to passively distribute chassis loads was engineered long ago by NASA for its Mars rovers."

"I am merely standing on the shoulders of these mature configurations, adding an attempt that might seem somewhat counterintuitive."

The screen cut again to a whiteboard covered in matrices and phasor diagrams.

In the center of the whiteboard were no needlessly complex partial differential equations, but only six striking angular values:

0°.

137.5°.

275°.

52.5°.

190°.

327.5°.

"Don't let the six legs line up in an orderly queue."

"And don't let them use the same material stiffness, the same stride, and the same fixed timing to make the exact same mistake when facing unknown terrain."

"Because a highly regular body structure, when encountering external disturbances of a specific frequency, will amplify a small local error into a catastrophe of total paralysis."

"The purpose of this V0 proof-of-concept machine is simply to test one hypothesis."

"If the parameters of the body itself are not so uniform, would it be harder for it to be destroyed by the same catastrophe?"

...

While this video was slowly creeping up from the depths of the internet, the doorbell at Jiang Lin's front door had been ringing countless times since nine in the morning.

The first to visit was Auntie Wang, who lived downstairs.

Carrying a bag of Guiwei lychees freshly bought from the market, the warm-hearted neighbor stood at the doorway, her smile crumpling the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes into a flower.

"Oh, Xiufen, congratulations, congratulations! Top in the province! I knew your Jiang Lin was special ever since he was little. Our old staff dormitory building is going to be a real Top Scholar Building from now on—I'll be walking with my head held high when I go out!"

Wearing an apron, Zhang Xiufen wiped her hands on her sides and quickly accepted the heavy bag of lychees, her voice filled with pride and awkwardness she couldn't hide: "Sister Wang, you're being too modest! We're old neighbors downstairs and upstairs, why waste money buying fruit?"

"It's only right, it's only right!" Auntie Wang laughed politely while craning her neck to look inside. "Where's Jiang Lin? Is he home? I'll just take one quick look to soak up some of the God of Literature's good luck, I definitely won't disturb his rest."

Zhang Xiufen subconsciously turned to glance at the tightly closed door of the second bedroom, which was completely empty.

"He had some business and went out."

Auntie Wang froze for a moment, though her smile didn't fade: "Running outside on such a big day when the results are coming out?"

"He said there was something he hadn't finished making and went to work on it."

Auntie Wang opened her mouth, clearly unable to comprehend.

Why would a top Gaokao scorer, on the very day results were announced, not stay home to wait for calls from university admissions offices or enjoy being showered with praise by relatives and neighbors, but instead run off to mess with something else?

Just as they were speaking, Jiang Lin's uncle and his family arrived.

As soon as his younger cousin came in, he headed straight for Jiang Lin's room.

"Auntie, where's my cousin?"

"He's not at home."

"Ah, not home again?" Disappointment was written all over the cousin's face. "I brought a brand new notebook specifically wanting him to sign it for me."

Zhang Xiufen was amused: "You little rascal, why on earth would your cousin sign an autograph for you?"

"Cousin is a great mathematician and now the top Gaokao scorer—it'll definitely be worth a lot in the future!" his cousin explained in all seriousness with wide eyes.

His uncle caught up from behind and slapped the cousin on the back of his head: "Stop talking nonsense."

Although scolding his son, the uncle couldn't help scanning the living room as he entered, looking for the person who ought to be the absolute star today.

Right at that moment, the doorbell rang again.

This time, it was a close old colleague from Jiang Jianguo's workplace, carrying two whole boxes of imported pure milk. Before stepping inside, his loud voice boomed in.

"Old Jiang, Old Jiang, you old rascal! Your son came in first in the whole province—such a huge deal, and you didn't leak a single word last night?"

"I only found out yesterday too, and it was only finalized today," Jiang Jianguo said, standing up to take the milk, his movements somewhat unnatural.

The old colleague looked around and didn't see his target: "Huh? The top scholar isn't home?"

Jiang Jianguo was silent for a moment and cleared his throat softly: "He went out."

"Going out on a day like today?"

"Yeah."

"What did he go to do?"

"Said he went to make something."

...

In a small garage near the faculty apartment building, not far from the residential complex.

Outside the window was scorching heat that could melt a person, while inside the garage, a second-hand window air conditioner hummed as it blew cold air.

On the workbench lay a white PVC cutting mat scratched into a mess by utility knives and vernier calipers.

Scattered around the mat were leftover aluminum profile scraps, several POM linkages that failed prototyping due to poor tolerance control, a small box of grease-stained miniature ball bearings, a few metallic-glistening self-lubricating brass bushings, and several nylon limit stops deeply grooved by repeated friction.

Quietly resting in the corner of the wall was a 24V low-speed high-torque brushless motor—the power solution Jiang Lin insisted on using.

In his view, using an internal combustion engine at this size scale was a completely unrealistic, exaggerated delusion; only electric drive could provide stable, controllable, low-speed high-torque output that matched Physics reality.

Beside the bench drill hung hand saws, needle files, vernier calipers, micrometers, and a neat row of Allen wrenches.

In the most prominent and well-lit spot on the workbench, several transparent ziplock bags were lined up.

Each bag had a label attached written in marker, the handwriting cold and neat.

[V0-1 / Third support leg knee joint bearing housing: Lateral impact induced micro-cracks]

[V0-2 / Damping spring K-value too low: System yaw divergence amplified]

[V0-3 / Pawl cam control phase angle shift: Premature locking resulting in mechanism self-locking]

[V0-4 / Rear right pawl engaged prematurely: Tooth surface abrasion marks]

Wearing a gray cotton T-shirt, Jiang Lin sat before the workbench, staring at the high-frame-rate slow-motion replay on his laptop screen.

The high-speed camera borrowed from Jiangda University stretched real time by hundreds of fold.

The frame froze at frame 143.

The tip of the brass pawl's tooth had just scraped past the edge of the rack at an extremely close distance.

At frame 144, the bottom of the supporting leg had just touched the ground, having not yet generated an actual reaction force.

At frame 145, the pawl had already bitten in firmly.

Too early.

The phase angle was early by merely a few degrees.

Under regular naked-eye observation at thirty frames per second, an error of a few degrees was completely imperceptible.

Even with this error, the machine could still clack its way over the obstacle course. If it were merely to shoot a two-minute video to farm clicks and attract sponsor investment, this performance would be more than enough.

But Jiang Lin knew clearly in his heart that these few degrees of error would sooner or later become the fatal flaw that killed this machine.

For one test, it could withstand it.

For ten tests, the stress remained within the material's yield strength limit.

After a hundred tests, a diagonal gouge would be carved into the brass tooth surface.

After a thousand tests, the pawl would slip at the exact moment of maximum stress.

In a truly complex, hostile environment devoid of logistical supply, it would suddenly lose the support of one leg at an unheralded moment, and the massive eccentric load torque would instantly flip the entire platform over.

In engineering, being able to move is by no means equal to success.

Being able to record a demonstration video is even less synonymous with reliability.

The core logic of this machine did not originate from any mystical vision of the future.

Rather, it came from the wreckage of a mechanical platform he had once seen beside the mid-level maintenance track of the Seventh Canopy Station during his seventh trip to the Wasteland.

He had given it a working title.

Canopy Outfield Passive Fault-Tolerant Load-Bearing Unit.

It was not a complete robot.

It was more like a fragment of mechanical logic left over after a disaster.

Linkages transmitted force, gear discs managed delay, pawls locked mechanism, springs provided a margin of fallback for erroneous movements; and those seemingly irregular support nodes isolated loads, impacts, and failures in a finite-type, globally non-repeating manner.

In the Wasteland, Jiang Lin spent many years surveying, disassembling, modeling, and building several scaled down replica prototypes.

The prototypes were ugly, slow, noisy, experienced severe bushing overheating, and suffered pawl wear far exceeding industrial standards.

Yet it crawled across the non-periodic test field generated by a finite region of Jiangs Bricks.

This proved one thing.

This mechanical logic from the wreckage of the Wasteland civilization could be reduced in dimension, scaled down, and re-expressed using ordinary materials from the Real World.

And this half-meter-long metal bug before him was not a full replica of that Wasteland machine.

It was merely Jiang Lin translating that unspeakable origin into a version understandable to the 2022 engineering community.

The Mars rover rocker-bogie mechanism was its publicly stateable lineage.

The Strandbeest linkage and RHex-style open-loop gait were its publicly stateable pretexts.

As for the layer that truly set it apart from ordinary hexapod machines—non-periodic phase, non-uniform stiffness, non-equidistant stride—that was an engineering conjecture Jiang Lin wrested directly from Jiangs Bricks, the wreckage of the Canopy Station, and the constant friction between local rules and global structures in MPS.

Therefore, it was no illusion of future technology.

Of course, handcrafting it in reality brought far greater friction than solving mathematical problems.

This cramped garage was no national key laboratory.

The small bench drill could make holes, but its stability, repeat positioning, and hole pitch consistency fell far short of formal tooling.

Vises could clamp material, files could trim edges, and try squares could calibrate, but in terms of efficiency, they couldn't begin to compare with the micron-level precision of a five-axis CNC machining center in a climate-controlled workshop.

Furthermore, there was no complete fatigue life test rig, no high-frequency vibrator, and certainly no dynamics simulation workstation to let him rapidly verify spatial linkage trajectory errors.

Hence, from the day of its birth, this V0 prototype was never a mature industrial product ready for mass production.

It was merely a question made physical.

A question posing a challenge to classic engineering paradigms at a desktop scale.

[part:gemini-3.5-flash-lite]

Abandoning all fragile electronic sensors and casting aside the path dependency of silicon-based chip computing power, relying solely on a set of low-speed rotating motors and the pure physical engagement of linkages, springs, pawls, rocker arms, and mechanical differential mechanisms—could this allow a machine to walk across chaotic and disordered terrain in a clumsy, slow manner, while striving not to let a single local failure escalate into a full-body collapse?

The deeper question is: if the six legs do not follow the same phase difference, do not use springs with the same K-value, and do not take steps of the same length, then when one of the legs misses its footing and makes a mistake in a pile of rubble, will this mechanical failure still rapidly infect the entire body along fixed rhythms and a fixed resonance frequency, just like in a rule-bound system?

This was an engineering conjecture forcibly birthed from the game between the local and the global in Jiangs Brick.

This conjecture was still very crude.

So crude that it could not even support the framework of a paper, let alone a mature application.

But Jiang Lin did not care whether it could turn into a conclusion right now.

He only needed it to solidly grow its first weight-bearing leg in the physical world.

When the first-version prototype was assembled, the linkage trajectory of the legs could indeed trace out a rough D-shaped gait.

But the landing points were too hard, completely lacking any flexible cushioning.

The machine walked less than half a meter on the wooden board before the knee joint bearing housing of the third leg directly cracked under a minute impact.

The crack extended outward from the edge of the M4 threaded hole, looking like an extremely minute metallic flash of lightning under a microscope.

Jiang Lin disassembled it and stared at the fracture for a full three hours.

The conclusion was straightforward.

The impact force was not absorbed by the system; the rigid structure treated walking as its sole goal, yet forgot the backlash of the ground reaction force in Newton's Third Law.

Therefore, by the second version, he replaced them with softer damping springs.

The machine finally walked without feeling as stiff as an iron block pounding the ground.

But new problems in system dynamics were immediately exposed.

It swayed on a tiny slope like a drunken man.

When the legs on the left pressed down, because the springs were too soft, the delay in the fuselage posture returning to center increased, and before the legs on the right had time to take over the load, the lateral swing amplitude of the fuselage was amplified bit by bit.

In the video recording, that metal bug was less walking and more struggling desperately to keep itself from collapsing downward.

For the third version, Jiang Lin ruthlessly added a pawl locking mechanism.

This was the idea of a one-way clutch. It propped up firmly during the support phase; once a leg stepped solidly, the pawl intervened to cut off the rebound path, no longer tossing the load back to the fuselage main beam haphazardly.

However, the timing of the pawl's intervention became a fatal flaw.

Because there were no electronic sensors to judge whether the footing was solid, the pure mechanical locking timing was set too early.

On the test board, after just taking two steps, the pawls of the front legs locked with a bang, while the load handover of the hind legs was not yet complete. The kinematic chain inside the entire machine instantly generated a topological conflict, and the body froze rigidly in place.

The 24V motor emitted a dangerous, muffled sound of overload.

With quick eyes and nimble hands, Jiang Lin yanked out the power supply.

Looking at the motor emitting wisps of a scorched smell, he had only one thought in his mind: it was not trapped by the terrain, but locked to death by the rules he had set himself.

The fourth version introduced phase gating.

He added a circle of carefully calculated profile cams on the main drive crankshaft, using pure mechanical cam lift to control when the pawls on each leg engaged and disengaged.

Support phase: forcibly locked.

Swing phase: degrees of freedom released.

The principle was as simple as a mechanical clock from hundreds of years ago.

But the problems faced were just as rigorous as a clock: off by a few degrees, and it missed a beat.

To clearly see these fleeting few degrees, Yao Siyu helped him borrow an idle high-speed camera from the laboratory.

Yao Siyu had originally heard Jiang Lin casually mention that he was doing a small mechanical test, and had only come over to take a look out of academic curiosity.

When she stood in the garage, watched the arduous crawling of that six-bar mechanism, and looked at the row of scrapped parts on the table bearing merciless labels, she fell silent for a long time.

"You call this a small test?"

While tightening a screw without raising his head, Jiang Lin replied, "It's just a desktop-level verification prototype."

Staring at the machine, Yao Siyu said nothing more and turned around to handle the borrowing procedures for the high-speed camera for him.

Under high-speed footage of two thousand frames per second, many movement details that the naked eye could only guess at finally transformed into conclusive physical evidence.

Take, for example, that fatal premature engagement.

What the naked eye heard was merely a crisp "click."

Yet in slow motion, one could clearly see that the brass tooth tip had brushed past the edge of the rack before the support phase truly bore force.

That collision was extremely slight, so slight that it wouldn't even affect a single obstacle-crossing test.

But repeated a hundred times, it would plow an oblique scar across the tooth surface.

Later on, Professor Lu Zhixing also learned about this matter.

He quietly helped him coordinate an idle time slot for a small vibration test bench at the School of Engineering.

Jiang Lin moved the control-group prototype—which adopted regular phases and uniform stiffness springs—over there to conduct low-amplitude frequency sweep testing.

When the vibration frequency swept to a specific waveband, the three legs on the right side of the entire machine simultaneously produced violent resonant shaking.

This result could not prove that regular structures were necessarily worse.

But it at least showed that under this prototype, this set of boundary conditions, and this frequency band, regular phases and uniform stiffness indeed made it easier to superimpose disturbances onto the same beat.

Subsequently, Jiang Lin switched to the fifth version, which was the prototype that truly adopted aperiodic parameters.

Scattering and taking the remainder of the phases according to the golden angle, and adjusting the stiffness of the springs into asymmetrical soft, hard, soft, soft, hard, and soft, he conducted the frequency sweep once more.

The resonance peak still existed; this was a physical law that could not be eliminated.

But that peak had become blunted.

No longer resembling a needle piercing straight into the heart, it had turned into a stone whose sharp edges had been worn smooth by the years.

Although it would still cause wear and tear, it was not enough to cause instantaneous structural collapse.

On a rigorous academic level, this experimental result was still far from sufficient to support the grandiose conclusion that aperiodic structures were necessarily more reliable than periodic structures.

But for Jiang Lin, this was already enough to tell him that this path was not just empty talk on paper.

In the fifth version, the six legs completely bid farewell to uniformity.

The phase difference between adjacent legs was no longer immovably fixed at sixty degrees.

Instead, they were staggered according to an approximate golden angle, and then the remainder was taken against the full three hundred and sixty degrees.

Since six legs were ultimately just an extremely limited discrete system, it could not be considered true infinite aperiodicity mathematically.

But this level of disorder was already enough to break that curse most likely to kill machinery.

Fixed rhythms.

Fixed stiffness.

Fixed stride lengths.

And, fixed error replication.

By six-forty in the evening, Jiang Lin pinched a tiny hex wrench and locked the final set screw into the crank shaft sleeve.

Exerting force from his wrist, he pressed down lightly.

Switching screws diagonally.

Re-tightening a second time.

Finally, he pulled out a black marker and steadily dotted a black line on the edge of the screw head and the aluminum alloy shaft sleeve.

An anti-loosening mark.

This kind of thing had no profound technological content to speak of.

But as long as the machine ran for a period of time, if the black line misaligned by even a millimeter, he would know at a single glance that this screw had loosened.

Those details in engineering that could save lives in extreme environments were often just this unpretentious.

He lifted the machine with both hands and placed it steadily at the starting point of the test board.

The mobile phone was fixed on a tripod, its lens locked dead onto the workbench area.

The laptop screen beside it was lit, and the Excel test record sheet had already been created.

[Aperiodic_Passive_Hexapod_V0-5]

[Test Item: Low-speed passage through aperiodic obstacle fields.]

...

[Remarks: Non-engineering application prototype; desktop-scale verification only.]

Jiang Lin reached out and turned the knob of the DC regulated power supply.

The motor emitted a low hum.

The experiment began.

The machine's walk was still quite unsightly.

It could not jump.

It could not turn around in place.

Much less perform highly theatrical actions like backflips.

Even crossing a three-centimeter obstacle made it appear rather clumsy and unbearable.

Every step felt like testing the boundaries of Physics; every step felt like a compromise with gravity.

Yet it simply did not fall.

The first obstacle section was passed.

The left side of the fuselage was forcibly propped up, but the right side did not consequently hang in the air out of control.

The differential balance beam at the bottom precisely calculated a physical average of the attitude potential energy of the rocker arms on both sides. The body merely tilted slightly, while the remaining legs still adhered to the ground as if they had grown roots.

The second obstacle section was passed.

The fourth leg completely missed its footing in a depression.

The pre-tightened spring extended accordingly, probing that leg downward rather than letting that corner of the fuselage lose support and smash directly.

Immediately following, the next leg rotated into the support phase.

The cam precisely depressed the pawl.

Engagement.

The huge load was handed over smoothly.

Expressionless, Jiang Lin typed a line of text into the test sheet.

[Test-043: Passed, fourth leg briefly lost load, load handover had no obvious impact.]

Then, he performed an action that could be called brutal in routine testing.

He suddenly reached out, grabbed the second metal leg preparing to take a step in mid-air, and pulled it forcefully upward into the air.

This was equivalent to letting this leg instantly suffer a sudden death and become ruined on a physical level.

The machine convulsed violently.

One side of the fuselage suddenly sank by half an inch.

The spring was violently compressed, emitting a teeth-aching friction sound.

The balance beam was forcibly deflected to its limit angle.

The already disordered rhythm of the remaining five legs was dragged even slower by this sudden external force.

However, the system did not collapse.

It was limping.

Yet it did not fall.

With a posture that was almost dragging across the ground, it forcibly crawled forward for another three steps.

Just as the fourth step was taken, an extremely weak lag appeared in a pawl on the right rear side, producing a metallic click that shouldn't have appeared.

With quick eyes and nimble hands, Jiang Lin immediately slapped down the power-off switch.

The test was forcibly stopped.

He flipped the heavy machine over and, under the light of the desk lamp, carefully inspected that sounding pawl.

Under the magnifying glass, an extremely shallow scratch appeared on the brass tooth surface.

This indicated that after experiencing extreme single-leg failure, the overall timing of the system still underwent a weak deviation, causing the engagement time to be earlier by a fraction of a second.

He calmly typed in the records.

[Test-044: Extreme single-leg failure demonstration, platform did not capsize. However, in subsequent gaits, the right rear pawl engaged early, and scratches appeared on the tooth surface.]

[Conclusion: Barely passed, but cannot be counted as stable passage. There is a risk of long-term wear, needs to be marked.]

Having finished writing this final sentence of summary, he let out a long breath and reached out to pick up the mobile phone that had been placed face down on the desktop.

As the screen lit up, the green icon of WeChat prominently displayed "99+" unread messages.

The family chat group was completely boiling over.

The red envelopes' red covers were everywhere.

The whole screen was filled with voice-message phalanxes.

Jiang Lin simply swiped quickly across the screen with his finger, picked a few elders who had to be replied to, briefly thanked them, and then pressed the power button, placing the phone face down back on the desktop once more.

It wasn't that he didn't understand what this bustling excitement meant to his parents.

It was just that for himself, the Gaokao process had already been completed.

For Jiang Lin, the crudely structured prototype before his eyes was far more challenging.

This flawed, hideous hexapod machine—and the unknown engineering Physics world it represented—was still far from seeing its end.

Seven-thirty-two in the evening.

Jiang Lin opened the editing software on his computer and began processing the video footage.

Filming these scenes in the beginning was not at all meant for posting online to gain attention; this was purely the standard procedure for experimental recording.

Some instantaneous mechanical impacts could not be captured by the naked eye at all.

It was impossible to see clearly which frame's pawl completed engagement first.

It was impossible to see clearly whether the spring was compressed right at the beginning of the support phase, or triggered by mistake due to minor vibrations at the end of the swing phase.

Only after slowing down the high-frequency footage to two hundred and forty frames per second or even lower would those actions, which originally blurred into a patch of afterimages, solidify into physical data that could be analyzed.

He hadn't deleted a single one of those failed segments.

The first version where the bearing housing directly cracked.

The second version where the machine swung like a pirate ship because the springs were too soft.

The third version where the locking cam phase was too early, causing the gears to jam and self-lock.

The fourth version where the pawls showed obvious scratches.

All these bloody failures were edited into the video without a single alteration.

If a public demonstration video only picked out that one percent of successful segments to broadcast, that wasn't engineering discussion; that was a scam advertisement.

Only by clearly displaying the physical causes that led to system crashes—this was the attitude engineering ought to have.

What truly prompted Jiang Lin to decide to upload the video to Bilibili was certainly not adolescent vanity desiring fame.

Because he had already stunned everyone with a single feat.

Nor was it to prove to those who only knew him for his good math skills that he was also a genius in the mechanical field.

Rather, it was because after experiencing dozens of lonely tests, he profoundly realized that his current state required a wild yet cruel peer review.

In the field of mathematics, he could write the proof process into a paper and post it on preprint websites, letting mathematicians around the world pick faults and find loopholes.

Having written a piece of code, he could package it into a minimal reproduction environment and post it on Github, letting others run it and hunt for bugs.

However, what about a purely physical engineering prototype?

He burrowed away blindly in the garage all by himself, and there was a limit to that.

There was no one to point at his nose and remind him when he designed the pawl's engagement angle too aggressively, "Brother, the wear rate of your tooth surface will sooner or later spin out of control under this operating condition."

There was no one to mercilessly splash a basin of cold water on him when he looked smugly at the spring stress curve.

Have you considered whether dust, oil stains, winter-summer thermal expansion and contraction, and long-term low-frequency vibration would turn this spring into a piece of scrap iron in half a year?

Even more so, no experienced veteran engineer would watch this machine crawl across the test board on limping legs and coldly ask, "Kid, your contraption has only been tested forty-four times at most; on what grounds do you dare write the word 'reliable' in the parameter table?"

Therefore, he was going to throw this ugly metal monster to a place where the engineering circle across the entire internet could see it.

Let veteran masters who truly knew the trade, understood mechanics, and had even tumbled and crawled in factories for over a dozen years scold him.

Let the big shots who had studied Boston Dynamics, studied Mars rover rocker arms, understood spatial linkage mechanisms, and understood hardcore maker hand-crafting come and frantically pick faults.

This picking and beating from all directions was far more valuable than him watching slow-motion recordings another hundred times alone in a stuffy garage.

The video introduction was typed out very restrainedly by him, revealing the dry, withered quality unique to a science-and-engineering guy between the lines.

[Low-cost pure mechanical structure verification.]

[Test Objective: Abandoning sensors, without relying on computing power for terrain judgment, relying solely on physical linkages and flexible components to complete low-speed obstacle crossing and load handover after single-leg failure.]

[Mechanism Lineage Tribute: Strandbeest (Jansen linkage) / RHex / rocker-bogie.]

[New Variable Attempt: Low-commensurability phase angle arrangement + non-uniform K-value stiffness + non-equidistant stride. Aiming to observe whether this configuration can weaken resonance superposition and cascading failure risks in regular gaits from the physical underlying layer.]

[Disclaimer: Extremely early non-engineering prototype, not tested for fatigue life, dust resistance, high and low temperatures, or full-band vibration spectra.]

[Welcome to point out flaws and flame away.]

Before publishing, Jiang Lin dragged the progress bar one last time to confirm that no core assembly drawings were leaked.

All critical connecting rod size proportions were obscured.

The initial preload parameters of the springs were not provided.

The cam lift curve controlling the timing of the pawl was cut out of the frame.

The tooth profile angle of the pawl was only given a blurry partial close-up.

Eight twenty-nine in the evening.

The blue upload progress bar began to crawl slowly up the screen.

Twelve percent.

Forty-one percent.

Seventy-six percent.

"Ding."

[Published successfully.]

Jiang Lin began to clean up the site.

The failed pawl with scratches was carefully placed into a self-sealing bag.

Labeled: [V0-4 / Right Rear Pawl Premature Engagement Scrape].

The fractured bearing housing was put into another bag.

[V0-1 / Cracks Caused by Stress Concentration After Lateral Impact].

In his eyes, these debris representing failure were far more valuable than the webpage displaying successful publication.

Outside the garage, the entire city was still immersed in the hustle and bustle of a summer night.

Meanwhile, in a tiny, tiny data node of Bilibili's massive servers, the first video from the Low Entropy Workshop lay quietly among the vast sea of new submissions in the machinery section, waiting to be salvaged by fate.

Ten minutes after publishing.

View count: 1.

It was Jiang Lin himself who had clicked into it just now to check the image quality.

Comments: 0.

Bullet comments: 0.

Favorites: 0.

This was the most authentic appearance of the internet.

A brand-new account with nothing, lacking a massive follower base, without an eye-catching borderline clickbait cover, and titles that didn't use cheap traffic-grabbing words like "shocking" or "exclusive premiere across the web".

The content was even a metal bug whose appearance was so crude it was almost discouraging, paired with a bunch of drowsy-inducing obscure engineering terms.

Jiang Lin closed the backend webpage without a care.

Picking up a small brush, he began to sweep up the aluminum alloy debris scattered at the bottom of the bench drill.

He wiped the bench vise stained with cutting fluid clean with a rag.

With obsessive-compulsive precision, he plugged hex wrenches of various specifications back into the tool rack one by one in order of size.

He turned off the lights, locked the garage door, and turned to walk into the sultry night.

Nine seventeen in the evening.

Video view count: 9.

In the desolate comment section, the first warm comment finally popped up.

[Aperiodic? Are any random Toms, Dicks, and Harrys on Bilibili rushing to ride the coattails of Jiangs Brick now? Do you even know what aperiodic means before writing random crap in the title?]

Two minutes later, the second comment closely followed.

[Pure clickbait, appraisal complete. Probably some college student making trash to pad their graduation design, adding a trendy math buzzword just to scam traffic.]

Until the third comment appeared, the public opinion shifted just a tiny bit.

[Hold your horses on the flaming, front two floors, okay? At least finish watching the video. Drop straight to four minutes and twelve seconds to see the single-leg load loss part; there's actually some substance to it.]

As time passed, the view count began to show non-linear growth.

View count: 731.

Sporadic bullet comments began to drift across the top of the screen.

[Holy shit, there really is no main control board inside this piece of junk, it's just relying on the motor to forcefully spin?]

[It really is ugly, industrial trash style, but it stumbles around and just won't fall over, a bit demonic.]

[Did they cobble this together from scraps in the lab in the middle of the night? Didn't even buy a casing?]

[I don't believe there's no IMU. With such a complex rubble field, how does it maintain balance without a gyroscope?]

[Replying to the previous comment, look at those wires. There are obviously only motor power supply and PWM speed control lines, not even an encoder line in sight. Pure mechanical blind walking.]

[This UP host's voice sounds so young, doesn't sound like an old professor.]

Meanwhile, in a small WeChat group named "Never Stop Tinkering (Hardcore Pure Version)", a link was tossed in.

[Brothers, check out the video posted by this new account. Although this dude made it as crude as hell without even chamfering, the logic of this mechanism design is definitely not something an ordinary undergraduate playing around could think of.]

Someone in the group responded quickly.

[Took a look, the term "aperiodic" is a bit attention-seeking.]

[No, no, no, look closely at the angles written on his whiteboard. He really scrambled the phases of all six legs, without using the traditional sixty-degree equal division.]

[More than just the phase. Look at the springs. The wire diameter and number of turns of those springs are all different; he intentionally used springs with different K values to distribute stiffness.]

[Wait, the key point isn't whether it can walk this crappy road at all. The key point is the final test where the UP host directly disabled one leg by hand. When the load was transferred instantly, the pawls forcibly took over the attitude purely relying on physical displacement. This fault tolerance rate is a bit perverted.]

[Damn. I saw the close-up of that pawl with scratches. This UP host is a ruthless man, daring to release such failed products; he's an honest fellow.]

Ten-four in the evening.

View count broke four thousand: 4127.

Comment count approached one hundred: 86.

Favorite count: 312.

The comment section completely split into two factions.

[Isn't this just a slightly more advanced wind-up toy? Why make it sound so mystical?]

[To the person above, can your toy perform adaptive load handoff after a single-leg load loss? Bring an ordinary wheeled chassis over and disable one support point and try it out?]

[The UP host posted all the failed parts. Regardless of everything else, the attitude is much better than those PPT car-making teams that only know how to publish rendering images.]

[The word "aperiodic" has become too popular recently because of that genius high school student Jiang Lin. I suggest everyone view it calmly and not get led by the rhythm.]

[Calm my ass, anyone who has worked on quadrupeds and hexapods knows that the resonance superposition of regular gaits is simply a nightmare. Once the machine's own stride frequency collides with the spatial frequency of the obstacles, no matter how awesome the sensors are, it will flip over. This UP host abandoned algorithms and deconstructed resonance from the physical bottom layer; this direction is genius.]

[A newbie timidly asks, what is the engineering significance of the approximate golden angle staggering on that whiteboard?]

[It's not metaphysics! It's to pursue low commensurability. Simply put, it's to prevent the entire physical system from entering a simple periodic repeating state.]

[Begging the big shot to explain what low commensurability means in human terms!]

[Human terms: Don't let six legs jump into the same pit in unison like newly enlisted recruits. If one leg sprains, the other five legs ignore it because of different rhythms, walking their own ways, and instead hold up the whole vehicle.]

As this hardcore popular science reply was upvoted to the front page by a large number of likes, the video's view and collection data ushered in its first steep climb.

Ten-thirty-seven in the evening.

An old hardcore locksmith UP host in the machinery section, who rarely takes sponsored content and is known for tearing apart various shoddy tech products by hand, reposted this dynamic.

His accompanying text was extremely concise.

[The prototype is made like a piece of shit, but there is so much solid content it could slap the faces of certain venture-backed startups that rely on piling up sensors. I suggest all you dogs working in machinery and control come take a look. The truly awesome thing about this UP host is not that he made an ugly bug walk, but that he dared not bet the entire reliability of the system on fragile silicon-based algorithms.]

This self-credited repost completely ripped open the floodgates of traffic.

This metal bug from the Low Entropy Workshop jumped out of its originally tiny traffic pool and began to spread across the entire tech section.

Many people clicked in with the mindset of watching a freak show.

Part of the people were sensitive to the academic buzzword "aperiodic".

Another group of people were hooked by the arrogant declaration of "not needing a brain".

As the data skyrocketed, users from the mathematics and Physics sections also began to cross over into the fray.

[Aperiodic, that word again? Just crawled out of the popular science video of Jiangs Brick, why is the machinery section starting this routine too?]

[Purely curious, what the hell does this crappy wheelchair have to do with the floor-tiling Jiangs Brick?]

[Just finished watching, it's really not forced clout-chasing. Jiangs Brick uses irregular geometric shapes to fill the entire infinite plane without repeating. This UP host uses irregular physical parameters on the timeline to fill the machine's motion cycle. One is space, one is time.]

[Holy shit! The game between local rules and global structure? This is a physical cheat code!]

Finally, an account suspected to be a college teacher left a long review of nearly a thousand words in the comment section, which was instantly pinned to the top.

[Everyone stop arguing about whether he is riding coattails; this is meaningless.]

[As an old hand who has struggled in this industry for more than ten years, I think the part of this video that gives me the creeps is that the UP host is using extremely cheap materials to ask an extremely profound engineering philosophy question.]

[Our robots nowadays rely more and more on computing power. Piling up radars, cameras, and chips. The biggest advantage of a regular gait is that it's easy to control, but its biggest fatal flaw is its predictable fragility. Once the disturbance frequency matches, the disaster will be amplified in a cascade.]

[Although this V0 prototype didn't even have chamfering done, and the pawl timing obviously had problems of premature engagement, the combination punch of low-commensurability phase + non-uniform stiffness + non-equidistant stride it displayed is definitely not something a beginner adjusts randomly by hand.]

[It is trying a brand-new survival philosophy: building the system's fault tolerance rate into its own imperfections.]

[If aperiodic structures in mathematics can prevent local rule collapse, then this machine is proving that aperiodic parameters in physical structures can similarly prevent a minor mechanical failure from spreading throughout the body like cancer cells!]

[This UP host is a prodigy. I bet this is definitely a secret alt account opened by a top domestic university laboratory, or some big shot from a military industry research institute doing amateur testing.]

Below the long review, bandwagon replies emerged endlessly.

[The big shot's analysis is thorough, I have attained enlightenment.]

[So it's ugly not because it's poor, but because it was deliberately made uneven? What the hell kind of cyberpunk industrial aesthetics is this?]

[No wonder he filmed the failed parts in such detail, so this was the core.]

[Who on earth is this? Although the voice has been processed, it really doesn't sound old.]

[It is absolutely impossible for an individual to cobble this together by hand; how could any individual reduce aperiodic mathematical concepts into mechanical engineering so smoothly?]

[Low Entropy Workshop, this name is a bit interesting.]

At the same time, in the Physics Department faculty office of Jiangcheng University.

Yao Siyu rubbed her sore eyes, preparing to turn off the computer and end a day of grinding out her thesis.

She habitually clicked open Bilibili's homepage, planning to slack off for three minutes before heading back to the dormitory.

In the personalized recommendations on the homepage, a dusty title jumped into her view.

《The Brainless Bug: Aperiodic Passive Hexapod Platform V0》

At first, she just felt that the three words "aperiodic" appeared somewhat eye-piercing because of Jiang Lin.

But when her gaze fell on that video cover, her mouse stopped.

That ugly machine, half a meter long, completely devoid of aesthetic appeal, and exposing various shoddy springs and metal connecting rods, looked more and more familiar the more she looked at it.

Yao Siyu's heartbeat skipped a beat.

She clicked it open.

Thirty seconds later, the asexual-style male voice from the video rang out, and Yao Siyu abruptly straightened her posture.

One minute later, she forcibly dragged the progress bar back to the beginning of the whiteboard screen, staring fixedly at those six eerie angle values.

Three minutes later, when she saw the machine in the video being forcibly stripped of a leg by a hand, yet still dragging itself forward as stubbornly as a cockroach, her expression had become indescribable in words.

That battered machine, she had seen it.

Just a few days ago, right in Jiang Lin's rundown garage.

At that time, it was still sprawled out on the workbench like a dissected corpse.

Jiang Lin had told her nonchalantly back then that it was called a desktop-level verification prototype.

She had even asked back half-jokingly: "You call this a small test?"

And now, this little toy that she had personally helped borrow a high-speed camera to shoot was being surrounded and crazily analyzed by a bunch of haughty machinery section big shots and research geeks in one of the most active tech content communities in the country.

Yao Siyu fell silent for a full minute, took a deep breath, copied the video link, and sent it directly to Professor Lu Zhixing.

Attached below was a message.

[Director Lu, take a look at this. Isn't this the thing Jiang Lin was working on a few days ago?]

The other end of WeChat was frighteningly quiet.

Professor Lu Zhixing did not reply immediately.

Ten minutes later, six characters popped up on the other side, and one could feel this young PI's blood pressure right through the screen.

[He calls this a toy?]

Half a minute later, the second message smashed over closely following, carrying an unquestionable commanding tone.

[Immediately forward the link to Teacher Guo Jianye of the School of Engineering.]

...

Twelve-forty-one in the morning.

The residential building that had been noisy all day finally quieted down completely.

Jiang Lin had already taken a cold shower and was quietly lying in bed entering deep sleep.

But what he didn't know was that the backend data of the Low Entropy Workshop was frantically jumping in an out-of-control manner.

View count: 23817.

Comment count: 643.

Favorite count: 2190.

The latest highly-upvoted comment was firmly pinned to the most conspicuous position.

[I want to know one thing right now, and I only care about this one thing.]

[What the hell on earth is the Low Entropy Workshop?!]

Among the hundreds of replies to this comment, an unremarkable ID casually chimed in.

[Isn't today just the day the Gaokao scores are released? Jiang Lin, the Physics-track top scorer in our province who scored 749 points, didn't he just happen to come up with an aperiodic Jiangs Brick earlier? Could it be him?]

Less than thirty seconds after this reply appeared, it was flamed into a sieve by a bunch of rational netizens.

[Brother, your imagination is too wild. Aperiodic is a mathematical concept, stop forcibly attaching everything to the top scorer, alright?]

[Jiang Lin is a top genius engaged in pure mathematics and theoretical Physics, how could he possibly run over to cobble together this kind of dirty and tiring work by hand? Do you understand disciplinary barriers?]

[Lmao, Gaokao scores are released today, the top scorer must be blocked at home drinking tea by the admissions offices of Tsinghua University and Peking University right now, and he'd still run over here to post car-repair videos? Have you read too many web novels?]

[Exactly, something with such obvious profound engineering experience foundations is either an old locksmith who has soaked in a factory for ten years or a boss-level PhD advisor. What can a kid who just graduated from high school understand about pawl phase offset?]

These replies quickly buried the faint truth deep within the information stream, and no one took it seriously anymore.