My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 288 My Turn

When the second pitcher of beer at the pub was halfway through, the atmosphere at the table subtly changed.

The alcohol relaxed the young people's nerves a little, but what followed was an undeniable fatigue.

That was a reaction from pure mental exhaustion, where even saying another word felt strenuous.

Sam leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms behind his head, and stretched vigorously.

He let out a long sigh and reached out to rub his slightly numb cheeks.

"I have to get up at six tomorrow morning."

Sam muttered something, sounding somewhat resigned to his fate.

David paused, holding the cup, and turned his head to look at him.

"To work as a nanny in a lab?"

"Otherwise what?"

Sam put his hand down, picked up a tissue from the table, and wiped his oily fingers.

"That damn server crashed again yesterday afternoon. If I hadn't gone to queue up for a restart soon, next week's data report would have been completely blank."

Allen, biting into a French fry, looked over with some puzzlement.

"Didn't your group just apply for supercomputer time?" Allen asked.

"I remember you were bragging last week that your fluid approximation project got access to the mainframe and you no longer had to fight with us poor folks for the institute's crappy servers."

Sam's face darkened further upon hearing this.

He picked up the glass of dark beer in front of him, gulped it down, and slammed the glass down on the table.

"Don't even mention it."

Sam tugged at his collar, as if he felt the air in the tavern was a bit stuffy.

"I even swallowed my pride and used my dad's connections for that project."

Sam didn't shy away from the people sitting at the table, his tone carrying a sense of self-righteous annoyance.

"The three-core review committee in the institute would normally take at least three months to process, which I couldn't wait for. So I had my dad call the dean directly and get the paperwork done before the weekend, thus securing the right to use that Cray mainframe."

Allen raised an eyebrow.

"You successfully cut in line, so what are you complaining about?"

"And the result?"

Sam sneered and pointed to his own nose.

"That damned logistics department of the hospital only approved 48 hours of machine time for our project team!"

There was a moment of silence on the table.

"Forty-eight hours?"

David frowned.

"You guys are working on high-dimensional fluid dynamics; you probably can't even finish running an initial model in this short time, right?"

"Who can argue with that?"

Sam sighed and leaned back in his chair.

"The remaining time was completely booked up by a few Pentagon defense projects and a few surviving big companies in Silicon Valley. Even if the director answered my dad's call, he couldn't conjure up any extra computing power for me."

David twirled the glass in his hand, the bottom of the glass rubbing against the table, making a soft rustling sound.

"That's how they are now."

David's voice was calm, with a hint of indifference.

"Two years ago, the Nasdaq crashed, and those guys in Silicon Valley who were blowing up the internet bubble burned through all their money. Now that the bubble has burst, funding is tightening across the US."

Allen stopped what he was doing and looked at the beer foam in his glass.

"Life at school isn't easy either. Supercomputers are such expensive things, so whoever provides the most sponsorship gets the highest priority."

"Military projects are backed by the Ministry of National Defense, while commercial giants are buying computing power with real money. As for those of us who work on theoretical algorithms, even if we have connections and can get ahead, we still have to accept the scraps they give us."

The old rock music in the bar happened to play a slightly faster-paced song.

The drumbeats were coming in rapid succession.

Chen Zhuo sat opposite him, holding a glass of soda water, listening quietly.

The ice in the glass had mostly melted.

He didn't interrupt.

Sam's words conveyed a sense of powerlessness.

This group of people has been used to using family resources to solve problems since they were young.

Three months in line?

You can get around it by making a phone call.

This is an invisible yet formidable barrier.

But now, Sam has hit a wall.

He used his privileges to bypass the formalities of human relationships, but ended up hitting the coldest ceiling of this era.

Shortage of hardware computing power.

Faced with absolute physical limitations, those villas on Long Island, trusts on Wall Street, and the dean's private phone calls all become useless.

"So where are you stuck now?"

David asked a question; although he didn't work in computer science, he had some understanding of topology algorithms.

Allen didn't say anything; he stretched out a finger and wiped it on his cold beer glass.

Fine water droplets clung to my fingertips.

Allen reached his hand into the middle of the table.

He drew a long horizontal line on the table with water, then drew several vertical lines that intersected to form a simple grid.

Chen Zhuo's gaze followed Allen's finger and landed on the grid drawn with water stains.

"Our group worked on high-dimensional fluid discrete approximation."

Allen explained as he drew.

His finger tapped at the edge of the grid.

"It uses Monte Carlo simulation combined with finite element analysis. Theoretically, as long as the mesh is cut fine enough, it can infinitely approximate the actual evolution state of the fluid."

After finishing his drawing, Allen took out a tissue to dry his fingers.

"Sounds perfect, right?"

Sam sneered and picked up the conversation.

"Perfect my ass."

Sam stared at the water-stained grid on the table, his eyes filled with frustration.

"Each time the algorithm reaches the boundary or approaches the singularity of the fluid, the program will automatically subdivide the mesh to maintain accuracy."

Sam held up two fingers and gestured on the table.

"This is not a linear growth. Once you reach the boundary, the number of grids that need to be divided explodes exponentially, from one to ten, from ten to one hundred, and from one hundred to ten thousand."

Sam slammed his fingers on the table.

"Forty-eight hours of memory? Even if you gave me four hundred and eighty hours, it wouldn't help! In the face of that terrifying exponential explosion, the memory would overflow the moment it approached its limit, and then what? The program would lock up, and the server would crash on the spot."

Sam picked up his glass and poured the last bit of beer into his mouth.

"This is not a matter of authority or connections at all."

He pushed the empty cup away.

"This is a fundamental flaw. Trying to approach that limit with such a brute-force algorithm would be impossible, even if you connected all the servers of universities across the United States together, and you still wouldn't get a complete result."

A brief silence fell over the table.

Chen Zhuo sat there, watching the water stain on the table gradually dry.

Monte Carlo simulation.

Finite element analysis.

An exponential explosion.

Memory overflow.

These words quickly went through his mind, then were stripped of their computer science jargon and reduced to their most fundamental logic.

Chen Zhuo picked up the soda water and took a small sip.

He got it.

This group of MIT geniuses attempted to bridge the gap between continuous and discrete computing by brute-force stacking of computing power.

They wanted to use countless tiny grids to forcefully fill that black hole.

As a result, they were firmly held down by the hardware ceiling of this era.

In the physics lab at Harvard, the old professor erased the singularity with a blackboard eraser, skipping rigorous proofs with his physical intuition.

In the MIT computer lab, Sam and Allen used a clumsy algorithm to brute-force their way to the target, but the program crashed due to insufficient computing power.

Physical intuition lacks mathematical rigor.

Computer algorithms are limited by the computing power of the hardware.

Both of these paths, when they reached their deepest point, became dead ends.

Chen Zhuo put the cup back on the table.

To overcome this ceiling, we cannot rely on assumptions from physics, nor can we rely on brute-force calculations from computers.

The only way is to not rely on any external physical computing power.

It relies purely on logic and dimensionality reduction using algebraic geometric matrices.

David was leaning back in his chair listening to Sam's complaints when his gaze inadvertently swept across the table.

He saw Chen Zhuo's eyes.

The fourteen-year-old Asian boy was staring at the water stains on the table.

His face still showed no obvious change in expression, but David could sense that Chen Zhuo's current state was completely different from when he heard them talking about the Long Island villa.

There was no helplessness about insufficient computing power, nor fear of the difficult problem in those eyes.

It was the look in your eyes that seemed to be rapidly dismantling some kind of structure in your mind.

David's gaze followed Chen Zhuo's line of sight and landed on the notebook beside Chen Zhuo.

That was what Chen Zhuo had mentioned in the physics department corridor that afternoon—a framework built with the bricks of physics, full of leaps and bounds, and riddled with loopholes.

David's lips curled up slightly.

He reached out and tapped twice on the wooden table.

Knock, knock.

Two sharp cracks interrupted Sam and Allen's continued complaining.

"Alright."

David straightened up and looked at the two MIT postdoctoral fellows opposite him.

"Stop complaining about your crappy server and unreliable dean. If you keep complaining, you'll have wasted your drinks tonight."

Sam stopped talking and looked at David with some confusion.

Allen also turned his head.

David slightly raised his chin and pointed in Chen Zhuo's direction.

"Weren't you guys going crazy because of mesh subdivision and memory overflow?"

David's tone carried a hint of amusement, as if he were enjoying the spectacle.

"Perfect timing. This afternoon at the Harvard Physics Department, Chen also built a model about meshes."

Sam paused for a moment, then turned to look at Chen Zhuo.

"You make mesh models?"

Sam's eyes held a hint of scrutiny.

"Does algebraic geometry also require mesh approximation?"

Chen Zhuo looked at Sam.

He didn't refute it, nor did he rush to prove anything.

He reached out and picked up the grid notebook that had been lying flat on the side of the table.

He pulled the pen from the edge of its cover and held it in his hand.

He looked at the three people on the table.

"I went to a lecture on string theory in the physics department this afternoon."

Chen Zhuo's voice wasn't loud, but it was heard very clearly amidst the noisy background noise of the tavern.

"The way physicists deal with singularities gave me some inspiration, and I did sketch out a discrete grid."

He paused, his gaze sweeping over Sam and Allen.

"However, David is right; it's full of skip steps and unproven convergence conditions."

Chen Zhuo placed the notebook on his lap but did not open it immediately. He looked at the water stain in the middle of the table that was almost completely dried.

"I don't use Monte Carlo simulation."

Chen Zhuo spoke, his voice calm and even.

Sam frowned.

"I don't use finite element method to cut the boundary."

Allen put down his wine glass and sat up straight.

Chen Zhuo looked at them.

"You're trying to push the limits with computing power, but I don't even have a regular desktop computer. All I have are algebraic matrices."

The music in the pub was still very loud.

But in that instant, the atmosphere at the table completely changed.

Allen didn't speak; he leaned back, making room for him.

Sam stared at Chen Zhuo, his previously casual attitude becoming more restrained.

"Without algorithmic approximation, without boundary trimming?"

Sam looked at Chen Zhuo as if he were listening to a fantastical tale.

"When your model encounters a singularity or a topological break, how do you converge? What do you rely on to reconnect that line?"

Chen Zhuo looked at Sam.

He did not answer the question.

Chen Zhuo stood up, turned his head, and looked at the wall at the deepest part of the tavern.

Under the dim wall lamp, the two old blackboards, stained with grease, hung there quietly.

Chen Zhuo turned his gaze back to the three people on the table.

"Didn't you say that you could draw any unproven wild idea on the blackboard here?"

Chen Zhuo spoke softly, tilting his head slightly towards the blackboard.