Chapter 106 - 103: (Intern) Countdown
While Lin Wei and Gao Wen were still fretting over the thermo-fluid coupling algorithm and the underlying computing power bottlenecks of the domestic photolithography machine,
Li Dong was sitting at his desk.
CLICKETY-CLACK...
His eyes were fixed on the screen, his hands rapidly typing code.
The program he had written earlier in the public computer lab, although it had already incorporated the multi-point evaluation dimensionality reduction approach from Riemann’s Manuscript and successfully run at the ten-billion level,
still had redundant computing power usage in its local processing of the mathematical expansion!
So now, in his dorm room and with no time limit, he was preparing to thoroughly optimize this new algorithm to its perfect form.
’On top of the FFT-based multi-point evaluation architecture, I need to abandon the Taylor series local approximation approach commonly used in academia, hmm...’
’I should use the Chebyshev interpolation mentioned in Riemann’s Manuscript to handle the multi-point evaluation of the core rational function. The approximation efficiency will be much higher that way.’
’Right, I also need to use the iterative splitting identity from the manuscript to completely separate the odd and even index terms in the core summation formula.’
’This will directly eliminate almost half of the repeated summation terms, which should save about 43% of the computing power overhead.’
Just as he was completely absorbed in optimizing the program, the dorm room door creaked open.
Liu Qiang and Chen Nan walked in, one after the other.
Wang Hao, who was already lying on the top bunk, poked his head out.
"You’re back? Where’d you go?"
"I went to the library to look up some materials," Chen Nan said. "I wanted to organize my thoughts and see if I could publish a paper in one of the less competitive journals."
Chen Nan felt that since he was at Yan University, he definitely couldn’t waste time. The library at Yan University had everything, and if he ran into anything he didn’t understand, he could just ask a professor.
Wang Hao nodded, not finding it strange at all, and then asked Liu Qiang,
"You went too?"
"Nah, I went to the School of Mathematics to sit in on an Algebraic Geometry seminar."
After speaking, Liu Qiang looked over at Li Dong and called out to him a couple of times.
"Brother Dong?"
"Brother Dong, have you eaten?"
However, Li Dong, sitting in front of his computer, continued to tap away at the keyboard as if he hadn’t heard a thing.
"Wang Hao, what’s Brother Dong doing? Is he possessed or something?"
Liu Qiang asked, turning his head in confusion.
Wang Hao sighed and said,
"He’s writing that program to calculate the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann Zeta function."
As a top-tier competitor who had won a CMO gold medal, Wang Hao was naturally no stranger to computer programming.
Once you reach a certain level in math competitions, you often need to use algorithms to verify conjectures or run brute-force searches. He himself had written similar programs in high school, just nothing as sophisticated as what Li Dong was doing—actually calculating Riemann zeros.
Liu Qiang and Chen Nan had both fought their way into Yuanpei College purely on their raw Gaokao scores.
Although they were both top students, at this point, having just started their freshman year, they hadn’t had much exposure to modern computer programming.
At Wang Hao’s reminder, the two of them instantly understood and nodded in realization.
"The Riemann Hypothesis..." Chen Nan said thoughtfully, looking at Li Dong’s back.
"Looks like we’d better hurry up and get a handle on this computer stuff, too."
"After all, modern mathematics can’t do without it."
Liu Qiang nodded in deep agreement.
"In that case..." Wang Hao, on his bed, also grew interested.
"How about we head over to the School of Information Science together tomorrow after our Mathematical Analysis class?"
"To listen to what?" Liu Qiang asked.
"To sit in on ’Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis’ at the School of Information Science and Technology!"
"I checked. Professor Liu Tian has a class tomorrow."
Liu Tian, a professor at Yan University’s School of Information Science, while not on the level of an academician like Gao Wen, was still a big shot in the field of numerical computation.
His lectures on algorithm optimization and numerical computation implementation were famous throughout the university for being hardcore.
"Alright, let’s go together then."
Liu Qiang and Chen Nan both agreed. Then, the two of them went to wash up.
When they came back from washing up, they found Li Dong still furiously typing away at his screen, his posture barely having changed.
It looked like he had entered a flow state.
Liu Qiang and Chen Nan had both experienced such a state in high school, so they knew the feeling was a rare and precious thing you couldn’t just achieve on command.
Never mind talking next to him; if you banged a gong right by his ear, he probably still wouldn’t snap out of it for a while, only to ask with a blank look,
"Who was that just saying they loved me?"
So they tactfully moved about quietly, careful not to disturb him.
If Li Dong knew what his roommates were thinking right now, he would have just calmly retorted in his mind,
’Rare and precious? I can enter and exit this state whenever I want.’
’Of course, if you’re talking about the Concentration +1 trial card, then that *is* indeed a rare and precious thing.’
The night deepened. It was almost 11:00 PM, and the dorm lights were about to go out.
Li Dong hit the last Enter key.
He let out a long sigh of relief.
The program was finally, completely optimized!
Looking at the already darkened dorm room, he plugged his computer’s power cord into the dedicated outlet under his desk.
Although Yan University dorms cut the power to the lights at 11 PM, the wall outlets under the desks had power 24/7.
’Come on, let me see where your limits are!’
A glint of excitement in his eyes, Li Dong pressed the run button.
’If the data looks perfect and verifies this algorithm’s complexity advantage, I should immediately start writing up the underlying mathematical logic into a paper.’
Watching the numbers scroll wildly across the screen, Li Dong closed his laptop halfway, got up to wash up quickly, then climbed into bed and was out like a light.
In the darkness, the fans of the Precision 7780 whirred.
On the screen, the Z(t) function values in the Gram intervals on the critical line were constantly refreshing, and the count of located zeros was jumping up in batches!
The ten-billion mark had taken three hours to break in the public computer lab. Now, after extreme mathematical substitutions and summation term compression, the string of green numbers crossed the ten-billion threshold in just one or two hours, its rate of increase showing no signs of slowing.
「At the same time.」
The screen of the phone by Li Dong’s pillow lit up imperceptibly.
In the WeChat background, on the group chat interface for the "Cyan Dragon Study Group,"
on the "Group Leader (Intern)" title, the word "(Intern)" was fading with the soaring zero count...
「The next morning.」
Sunlight streamed in through the balcony.
Li Dong yawned, rubbed his clear eyes, then rolled out of bed and went to his computer desk.
He lifted the screen. The black console window was still running normally.
[Current Zero Count: 88,754,321,000...]
’It’s about to break the one-hundred-billion mark!’
Li Dong clenched his fists, the elation in his heart washing away much of the drowsiness from his upcoming 8 AM class.
’There’s no problem with the algorithm. I just don’t know where the limit of this mobile workstation is.’
Just then, his roommates began to get up one after another.
Li Dong turned around, looked at the others getting dressed, and took the initiative to speak.
"Hey, guys, this program I’m running on my computer is probably going to take a long time."
"If the dorm’s electricity bill goes over the limit, I’ll cover the extra cost myself. Don’t fight me on it."
His roommates all laughed and waved their hands dismissively.
"Hah! It’s no big deal, Brother Dong. How much electricity can one computer use? You don’t have to cover it alone; we can all just split it."
Even though they all said it was fine, Li Dong knew in his heart that this kind of thing had to be cleared up in advance.
The cost might not be much, but if you use a shared resource without saying a word, pretend nothing happened, and then let everyone split the bill in the end, people will inevitably feel some resentment.
Afterwards, the four of them washed up and left the dormitory, talking and laughing.
This morning, they had a mandatory class for Yuanpei College freshmen: Mathematical Analysis.