Chapter 180 - 175: Three Months
Everyone in the conference room looked at Li Dong.
E Weinan, Yao Qizhi, Gao Wen, Sun Ningsheng...
Any one of these names, taken on its own, was enough to command silence in any venue in the Huaxia Mathematical Community.
But today, they were all sitting here, waiting for a college freshman to give them an answer.
Li Dong fell silent.
It wasn’t that he had stage fright.
Rather, he had already maxed out his 0.4 Basic Attributes.
The architectures for two generations of the dimensionality reduction algorithm appeared in his mind.
The first-generation algorithm, independently deployed and verified by Jiang Yubai’s team at Capital University, had pushed the full-scale verification of the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann Zeta function to the 10^17 level.
And this very algorithm had caught the eye of National Power Equipment.
This was because its underlying Logic could be mapped to the real-time numerical solution of the three-dimensional N-S equations.
According to the internal tests Huaxuan Technology had previously conducted, using the first-generation algorithm with Huaxuan Technology’s existing hardware platform could reduce computational overhead by nearly two orders of magnitude.
Within about a year and a half, they could cross the engineering threshold for real-time fluid field prediction.
A year and a half.
That number alone had the entire Huaxuan team so excited they were losing sleep.
But that was just the first generation.
It had found a shortcut to break through the limitations, but the iterated algorithm rewrote the entire map!
The entire mathematical Logic for the dimensionality reduction was reconstructed.
It was no longer a simple saddle-point approximation. Instead, it was based on the decomposition structure of automorphic representations in the spectral space, directly constructing a complete basis for a low-dimensional invariant subspace.
By using this basis to expand the original N-S equation system, a large number of high-frequency oscillation terms would be naturally eliminated due to orthogonality.
Not truncated, not approximated, but eliminated.
This was the iterated algorithm that Li Dong had never revealed.
Furthermore, he had been continuing to pore over Riemann’s Manuscript from time to time.
He’d had some breakthroughs. While not as significant as the leap from version 1.0 to 2.0, they were enough for Li Dong to make a small update to the 2.0 version.
He had discovered a more refined dual relationship between the Fourier coefficients of automorphic forms and the distribution of zeros of the Riemann Zeta function.
This relationship allowed him to further compress the dimensionality of the basis during the spectral decomposition process without any loss of precision.
This version of the algorithm could now be called 2.1.
’If we’re talking about version 2.1... ’
Li Dong quickly estimated in his mind.
The cost of real-time solving for a million-level grid could, under the 2.1 algorithm, be compressed to an equivalent computational load of a thousand-level or even a hundred-level grid.
’Millisecond-level feed-forward prediction?’
’No, microsecond-level.’
’An order of magnitude faster than the physical response time of the hardware control loop.’
This meant that the fluid field control system for the immersion lithography machine could not only achieve "real-time prediction" but could even perform "advance prediction."
Before the system even had a chance to develop a problem, the algorithm would have already given you the correction plan.
Li Dong raised his head and looked at everyone present.
"Based on the current algorithm, if we deploy it on Huaxuan Technology’s existing hardware platform..."
He stated it as if it were a theorem that had already been proven.
"Real-time prediction of the three-dimensional thermo-fluid-coupled field inside the immersion chamber can achieve a microsecond-level response."
"The equivalent computational overhead is reduced by about four to five orders of magnitude compared to the first generation."
The conference room was silent for a full five seconds.
E Weinan’s brow shot up.
As a leading figure in the field of applied mathematics and computational science, he understood the meaning of "four to five orders of magnitude" more profoundly than anyone else in the room.
The first-generation algorithm had reduced it by two orders of magnitude, which was already work sufficient to rewrite textbooks.
And now another four to five?
That wasn’t just rewriting the textbook; that was tearing it up and starting from scratch.
Yao Qizhi set down his teacup.
The Turing Award laureate had seen too many geniuses.
But "genius" had levels.
Some people were one step ahead of others, some were ten steps ahead, and some...
...were standing right at the finish line, waving back at you.
The corner of Gao Wen’s mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.
Although Zhao Fangming didn’t come from an algorithm background, as the Vice President of Hua Wei’s chip strategy department, his sensitivity to the term "computational power" was no less than anyone else’s present.
It was just that this figure was a bit too far beyond his scope of understanding.
He instinctively turned his head and asked Lin Wei, who was beside him.
"President Lin, at this level of computational power... how long would it take to implement?"
Lin Wei didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he lowered his head and quickly flipped through a few pages of the technical document in front of him.
That document contained the engineering evaluation report that Zhang Mo’s team had previously prepared based on the first-generation algorithm.
Hardware adaptation cycles, testing and verification processes, safety margin redundancies... all the time-related milestones were clearly marked.
Now, with the computational overhead slashed by four to five orders of magnitude...
All the stages that were previously listed as long-term R&D targets because they were "too computationally expensive" could be skipped entirely.
Simulation modules that would have originally required the next generation of chips to be taped out could now run on existing hardware.
Control loop parameters that would have originally taken six months of iterative optimization could now converge within three weeks.
Lin Wei looked up and gave an answer that sent a jolt through everyone.
"Three months."
Zhao Fangming couldn’t help but exclaim in astonishment.
"Three months?"
In other words, in three months, National Power Equipment’s immersion lithography machine would possess a "brain" that was truly Huaxia’s own.
’And Hua Wei would no longer be at the mercy of others?’
Zhao Fangming leaned back slowly in his chair, his mind already calculating how he would report this news to the corporation when he got back.
The meeting continued.
For the remainder of the time, Gao Wen and E Weinan, from the perspectives of high-performance computing architecture and numerical analysis respectively, raised some questions for Li Dong about the technical details of the algorithm’s deployment. Li Dong, in turn, offered some suggestions for its implementation.
Gao Wen was focused on the parallelization plan. After the dimensionality reduction, could the solving of the residual low-dimensional subspace be further split and scheduled as a pipeline on a multi-core heterogeneous platform?
What if the bottleneck wasn’t computational power, but data transfer latency?
E Weinan’s question was the most pointed. He was concerned about error control.
With a dimensionality reduction of four to five orders of magnitude, how much did the precision decay?
Under the boundary conditions of engineering tolerance, was there a rigorous mathematical proof for the upper bound of the worst-case error?
And at that moment, Yao Qizhi suddenly posed a question.
"What is the computational complexity of this basis selection process in the worst-case scenario?"
"If the input scale continues to increase—let’s say you wanted to push the verification level up by another two orders of magnitude, to the 10^25 level—would the basis construction itself become the new bottleneck?"
It was an incredibly incisive question.
It bypassed the performance of the algorithm itself and pointed directly at its scalability—in other words, just how far could this path be taken.
Li Dong said with a smile.
"That would depend on... whether *I* have a bottleneck!"
As soon as he said it, the entire conference room fell silent. Then, Yao Qizhi began to applaud, and soon the room was filled with the sound of clapping.
The meeting, which had started at ten in the morning, continued late into the afternoon, pausing only for some boxed lunches to be brought in.
No one was in the mood to leave the conference room.
Everyone knew that what was being discussed in this room might one day be written into a page of the Huaxia Semiconductor Industry’s history.
Around seven in the evening, the final technical detail was finally settled.
But the meeting wasn’t over. Zhao Fangming was still quietly discussing the subsequent confidentiality agreements and project classification management plan with Lin Wei.
「At almost the exact same moment.」
The news began to play, right on schedule.
A voice came from the television.
"If the youth are strong, the nation is strong. If the youth are wise, the nation is wise. In the Huaxia Mathematical Community, a nineteen-year-old freshman is, at a stunning speed, redefining the very meaning of the word ’genius’..."