Chapter 167 - 124: God’s Draft
Then, he hung up the phone, turned around, and extended his hand to a pleasantly surprised Bob.
"Let me have it."
"Yes, of course!"
As if he’d just been pardoned, Bob hastily opened the briefcase he carried and carefully took out a printed manuscript, meticulously protected in a folder. He handed it over with both hands.
Terence Tao accepted the manuscript, his gaze first falling on the title.
On the Boundary of Differential Manifolds in Generative Models and the Control of Hallucinations
The title alone was enough to bring a flicker of imperceptible approval to the profound eyes behind Terence Tao’s gold-rimmed glasses.
’Differential Manifolds...’ he thought to himself.
Approaching the pervasive "hallucination" problem in large models from this angle was indeed a theoretically viable and extremely ambitious technical path.
In fact, he himself had seriously considered the possibility of this direction more than once over the past two years.
But each time, he had only scratched the surface, never truly delving deep.
There was a simple reason for this: the path was just too difficult.
The mathematical tools and theoretical methods required were not only vast in number but also spanned several vastly different fields, such as Differential Geometry, algebraic topology, stochastic processes, and optimal control.
Just thinking about it off the top of his head, Terence Tao could already envision at least a dozen key steps that would require rigorous proofs and massive calculations.
The sheer volume of work was so terrifying that even he felt somewhat daunted by the prospect.
It wasn’t that he felt he lacked the ability to complete it.
Rather, he simply had too many projects and topics on his plate already. Each one demanded a significant amount of his energy, leaving him with no spare capacity to start a new one.
It was for this very reason that when he saw that the author of this paper actually dared to take on this challenge, Terence Tao felt an unexpected touch of goodwill for the author he had never met.
He continued reading, his eyes falling on the author’s signature line.
Lin·Chen
’Chen Lin?’
Terence Tao’s brow twitched slightly.
’A Huaxia person? Or of Huaxia descent?’
He was one hundred percent certain he had never heard this name at any academic journal or conference.
However, this didn’t cause him to feel any disdain.
After all, Asia had no shortage of brilliant mathematicians.
Besides, all one had to do was look at the USA’s national Math Olympiad team in recent years, with its lineup of exclusively Asian faces, and recall the staggeringly high proportion of engineers of Huaxia descent at the top tech giants he’d visited...
Terence Tao felt that even if this author was previously just an unknown young person, it was entirely reasonable for them to produce research of considerable value.
He collected himself and focused his full attention on the main body of the paper.
A few minutes passed...
Ten minutes passed...
Terence Tao’s body, as if hit by an immobilization spell, remained completely still in its original standing posture.
His profound eyes were glued to the manuscript, his brow furrowing deeper and deeper.
Bob, standing to the side, saw Terence Tao’s unprecedented level of focus and subconsciously slowed his breathing, afraid of making the slightest sound that might disturb the legendary scholar’s thoughts.
The small bit of hope in his heart was now rapidly inflating like a balloon.
Another five minutes went by before Terence Tao finally moved.
He casually leaned the suitcase, its handle already extended, against the wall. Then, without a word, he took the few sheets of A4 paper, turned, and walked into his study, closing the door behind him with a CLICK.
"Phew..."
Seeing this, Bob finally let out a long sigh of relief, his entire body relaxing.
He stretched his shoulders, which had grown stiff from prolonged tension, and casually sat down on the living room sofa. An unconscious, triumphant smile crept onto his lips.
Having worked with Terence Tao for so many years, he knew the professor’s style all too well.
If he chose to take the paper into his study...
...it could only mean one thing—the paper’s content had captured his attention!
He needed a quiet environment to meticulously and rigorously verify the arguments and calculations within!
Inside the study, Terence Tao spread the manuscript flat on his large desk and took out a stack of pristine scratch paper and a pen from a drawer.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he began from the first section of the paper, verifying it line by line with handwritten calculations.
"How to efficiently solve the High-dimensional Monge-Ampere Equation numerically to compute the boundary of the data Manifold in large-scale generative models..."
"How the geometric structure (e.g., curvature) of singular sets quantitatively affects the probability of hallucination generation..."
"Designing a ’calibrator’ based on Manifold boundary detection to verify and correct generated content..."
The author’s line of reasoning was terrifyingly clear, and the logical chain was seamless.
The mathematical tools and proof methods he employed were novel and ingenious, combined flawlessly.
So much so that in the process of verification, Terence Tao couldn’t find a single, solitary flaw.
He couldn’t even find one area that could be slightly improved.
Except for a few places in the writing style that showed obvious, awkward traces of being translated into English with AI assistance, in the core mathematical calculations and arguments...