It only took Lu Fan a week to finish the basic framework for the platform and from there, it had nothing to do with him.
All that was left was to wait for the collected data to be sorted through and the platform will do everything else.
It was fairly simple to do. All he had to do was have the surveys cross reference with each other and double-check with the content available online and the platform would learn from the information that was deemed correct.
By the time it was time to launch the platform, the information that would pass the automatic checks would have a 90% accuracy. At that time, he would have to hire qualified personnel to confirm and correct mistakes.
This was the power of machine learning.
The only thing now left was for the servers.
Lu Fan wanted to buy a building, but it proved to be a bit more difficult than he expected.
The first thing that proved to be difficult was that he did not have an ID. He was still underage and it was a bit more complicated to explain his income source.
META was under Chen Lu's name and Li Lin provided the building, so it was easier, but it was a completely different story if he wanted to buy a building.
For some reason, Li Lin was against buying a building under her name. Lu Fan tried to convince her but it was all for nothing.
Chen Lu on the other hand did not have the money to do it. It was true that Lu Fan could transfer money to Chen Lu, but such a large transaction would attract unwanted attention.
It was still 2009 and everyone was sensitive to such a sudden transaction. Especially one that came straight from a foreign account. There were ways to go about it, but Lu Fan did not want to put Chen Lu through all that stress.
With her vague understanding of these things, she might get worried that he was doing something illegal and that was a whole other mess he did not want to deal with.
As for buying it via META, it was impossible. Even if he put the whole company to take a loan, the amount would not be enough to buy the building he needed.
The things he planned to do needed a huge space and META was barely handling running without him injecting funds. If he did more, it would probably collapse directly.
The only thing that he could do was rent a warehouse.
Actually, it was easier to buy one, but he did not want to do it directly.
The challenges he faced trying to acquire a simple building woke him up.
One had to know that the land prices were still relatively cheap and the policies were very lax compared to the following years. It was going to get more and more complicated and he did not want to run around all day just to acquire a building.
He had money, it was better to have someone else do it.
But all that had to wait for him to set up a server farm.
After running around and searching for a while, he could only settle for servers from a failed Email service business.
He had tried getting the best money could buy, but again, his underage and student identity got in the way. Just getting those things through customs would be a nightmare.
Since he could not get them outside, he decided to buy from local agents, but that was also a problem. The procedures aside, it would take him 4 months to get everything ready for installment.
He had to wait for those vendors to acquire the servers, start transporting them, prepare the warehouse for installment, install the servers, and make sure that everything was running smoothly.
Lu Fan was in despair. 4 freaking months. By the time everything was ready, the optimal period for the platform to launch would be gone. While that would only mean more time for publicity, Lu Fan would rather have the first release during the exam period.
He had to take the chance to prove just how amazing it was instead of having to spend more money convincing people to use it.
Furthermore, four months later, he would have his own ID. At that time, he could buy land and import higher-end hardware. If waiting could not be avoided, it was better to wait for better goods.
The only thing Lu Fan could do was buy second-hand servers. He did not even have to do anything and could start using them at once. The only thing that troubled him was that he could not put the core programs on those servers.
One thing is that these servers were built for completely different protocols. Their power was focused on sending, receiving, and sorting information.
If he forced them to start handling Blockchain and the machine learning end of the platform, it would be disastrous.
They were, however, perfect for the Surveys and Questionnaires.
All these problems forced him to assemble his own server to handle the machine learning.
Nakamoto was going to introduce Bitcoins in a while and that would make buying servers easier, but until then, he decided to buy parts from different vendors and assemble a couple of servers to at least serve the candidates within the country.
It was actually less expensive to do this if he were to do it himself, but that was like spending time to save money. That was something only poor people do.
An hour he spent building a server could potentially earn him millions of dollars in the stock market. Or he could perfect the program by another 10%. It was not worth doing.
He wouldn't have done it had he had any other option. As for hiring people to do it, that was not possible.
Jing did not have such experts, and getting one here was more annoying than going through customs. It was easy with money but annoying.
Just imagining spending more time explaining the overall architecture that could handle his machine-learning protocols gave him a headache.
And that was before we even started talking about blockchain.