Chapter 100 - 97: I Came Up With It Myself
Li Dong had started coding not long after getting on the train, and now he had been hammering away at it for over four hours.
For a "beginner," perfectly nesting Riemann’s dimensional reduction algorithm into C++’s low-level memory management, not to mention calling the FFT library for multipoint evaluation, was an incredibly mentally taxing task.
CLACK!
Li Dong hit the Enter key on the last line of code, then stretched.
He gave it another careful check from top to bottom, reviewing the memory pointer releases and boundary condition settings.
’No problems. Perfect.’
Then he took a deep breath and gently clicked the "Run" button.
A black console window instantly popped up on the screen.
The first line prominently displayed the initial search parameters: [Target Interval: t∈[10^20, 10^20 + 1.5×10^6]]
Immediately after, line after line of green numbers cascaded down the screen.
10,000...
100,000...
1,000,000...
Each jump of the counter represented hundreds, even thousands, of non-trivial zeros of the Riemann Zeta function being captured and verified. The cumulative total was climbing at a dizzying pace.
Li Dong couldn’t help but feel a thrill of excitement as he watched the screen.
’It’s working! It’s really working!’
Furthermore, because the algorithm’s time complexity had dropped from the Riemann-Siegel formula’s O(t^(1/2)) to an order of magnitude even lower than the Odlyzko–Schönhage algorithm’s O(t^(1/3+ε)), coupled with an elegant memory reuse mechanism, the thin and light laptop showed no signs of freezing or getting the blue screen of death as it had before.
’My reasoning was correct! Riemann’s algorithm can actually be substituted in...’
As Li Dong stared at the screen, he failed to notice his phone—tossed onto a corner of the small tray table—suddenly light up.
In the background of the WeChat interface for the "Cyan Dragon Study Group"...
...within the [Group Leader (Intern)] title next to Li Dong’s profile picture.
The word "(Intern)" was slowly fading away.
Meanwhile, in the group chat...
[John von Neumann]: Almost time.
[Albert Einstein]: It seems the Senior’s foolish nephew isn’t a complete idiot after all.
[Niels Bohr]: Albert, don’t change the subject. Between you and me, one of us has to be right, and one has to be wrong.
[Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev]: [Puts on sunglasses and eats popcorn].
[Isaac Newton]: What in the world are you all talking about?
However, these messages only remained on the screen for less than three seconds.
Then they vanished.
And Li Dong was completely oblivious to all of this.
The high-speed train sped across the North China Plain.
「Three hours later.」
Amazingly, after three straight hours of high-intensity, maximum-load computation, the surface of the ThinkBook’s keyboard was warm to the touch, but the business-oriented ultrabook showed no signs of crashing.
The algorithm Li Dong wrote was just too clean! It produced no unnecessary memory fragments, its memory reuse mechanism was incredibly efficient, it wasted almost no memory bandwidth, and it placed no extra scheduling overhead on the CPU.
By now, the count of zeros within the interval on the computer screen had jumped to—10^7!
Ten million non-trivial zeros in the extremely High Tier interval of 10^20!
And Qin Fei, sitting in the window seat next to him, was utterly dumbfounded.
He took off his noise-canceling headphones and just stared blankly at the screen.
’Ten million? It broke ten million?’
Objectively speaking, that wasn’t a huge number, but it had only been three hours!
’In three hours, on a crappy little ultrabook, you found ten million non-trivial zeros of the Riemann Zeta function in the extremely High Tier 10^20 interval?’
’What kind of cosmic joke is this?!’
Back in the computational lab at the Beijing Institute of Technology, Qin Fei had used a small server cluster—costing hundreds of thousands of yuan and equipped with dual 32-core CPUs—to run the Odlyzko-Schönhage algorithm. Even for that, calculating just ten million zeros in the t≈10^15 range took at least an hour and a half! And that was nothing compared to an extremely High Tier interval like 10^20!
On the surface, the lab’s 1.5 hours was indeed faster than the ultrabook’s 3 hours.
But that was absolutely not the right way to compare them!
That was a small server cluster with a computational power of trillions of operations per second!
And this thing here was just an ultrabook meant for word processing, without even a dedicated graphics card! Its hardware’s computational power wasn’t even one-twentieth of a single server in the lab!
Using one-twentieth of the computing power, it took only twice as long to process a terrifyingly larger dataset at a higher tier?
According to the common sense of computer science, that was absolutely impossible! No existing algorithm could make that kind of leap! The only way was if the algorithm he was using was on a completely different level, one that rendered all current top-tier algorithms obsolete!
’Fake... This has to be fake!’
Qin Fei kept trying to convince himself.
’He’s not running a program at all! He’s just playing a video! That’s right, it’s a pre-recorded video just to show off!’
But as a top junior majoring in HPC, how could Qin Fei possibly fail to distinguish between a console running a real-time compilation and a video playing back?
It was simply his academic pride as a formally trained top student that made him instinctively reject what he was seeing!
’No professor ever taught me this kind of algorithm, and not a single top-tier conference paper has ever mentioned this kind of method!’
Qin Fei took a deep breath and leaned closer to Li Dong.
He was about to get a closer look to see if it was some kind of prank program.
Just as he leaned his head in for a look...
SNAP!
The computer screen went black without any warning!
The keyboard backlight died, and the sound of the fan vanished.
The Lenovo laptop had simply given up...
"Fuck!"
"Fuck!"
Both men’s voices rang out in the train car at the same time.
Only then did Li Dong notice the guy with the headphones next to him, who was now leaning right in close, a look of even greater agitation on his face than on Li Dong’s, the actual owner of the laptop.
Li Dong was startled.
"Dude, what are you doing?"
Qin Fei then realized his posture could easily be misunderstood.
But he couldn’t be bothered with politeness right now. He stammered,
"Uh... Hey, man. You... you were just running a... a non-trivial zero verification for the Riemann Zeta function, right?"
Li Dong gave a resigned nod.
"Yeah, I was."
Getting a confirmation, Qin Fei continued to ask,
"Then... that super-low-complexity algorithm you were just using, the one that expands the main and secondary terms using an FFT grid—where did you see that?"
It was only then that Li Dong realized this guy had been peeking at his code the whole time.
’Weirdo!’
’Well, so what if he saw it.’
’Could he even understand it?’
’After all, I researched it for so long, and my Basic Attributes are high. Even then, I barely managed to build this bridge.’
’Still, since he’s asking me point-blank...’
Li Dong mused internally.
’In this world, Riemann has been dead for over a hundred years.’
’Since this algorithm is about to see the light of day again, someone has to be the one to carry the burden.’
And so, Li Dong looked at Qin Fei and, without so much as a blush, uttered four words!
"I came up with it."
"..."
Qin Fei: ...
’You came up with it? You came up with a god-tier algorithm that could completely dominate the entire field of Computational Mathematics today?’
’If you could come up with something like that, the Turing Award committee would be knocking down your door tonight!’
Qin Fei took a deep breath, just as he was about to press him for more details on how the algorithm managed its memory pointer releases.
DING DONG.
A gentle female voice suddenly came over the train car’s intercom:
"Dear passengers, the train will soon be arriving at its final destination, Beijing West Station. Please gather your personal belongings and prepare to disembark..."
The announcement forcefully stuffed the bellyful of questions Qin Fei had right back down his throat.
He glanced at the black-screened laptop, then back at Li Dong.
Although he was internally reeling with shock and disbelief, until the program finished its run and output a final error analysis report, no one could know if the algorithm would suffer a precision collapse or throw a low-level error after a few hundred million more zeros.
He couldn’t make a final judgment now on whether it was a world-shaking truth or just an empty, crowd-pleasing gimmick.
But one thing was certain: the guy in front of him was an absolute monster who knew his stuff.
Qin Fei pulled out his phone and opened his WeChat QR code.
"Uh... hi, man. I’m a student from the Beijing Institute of Technology, in the Computer Science and Technology program, specializing in HPC—High-Performance Computing."
"My name is Qin Fei. Can I add you on WeChat? We could talk about algorithms sometime!"
Li Dong froze for a second, looking at the QR code shoved in front of him.
This was the first time someone had ever asked for his WeChat. And it was a guy, no less.
But he quickly corrected himself internally.
’No, wait, this is the second time. The first time was back in Rongcheng’s Taikoo Li, with that Lin Xinru...’
At the thought, Li Dong shuddered and quickly shook the unpleasant memory from his mind.
He took out his phone, scanned Qin Fei’s QR code, and nodded. "Sure."
BEEP. The WeChat friend request was successful.
Li Dong stuffed the laptop into his backpack and stood up.
"Come on, time to get off."