My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 289 Discussion

Chen Zhuo pulled out a chair and stood up.

He took out his pen and tore a few blank sheets of paper from his notebook.

The tavern was still very noisy.

The bass drumbeats of old rock music traveled down the slightly sticky floor, making one's feet tingle slightly.

Several loud cheers erupted from the bar area, apparently because a goal had been scored in a football match.

Several young men carrying huge beer mugs squeezed past Chen Zhuo, their laughter, heavy with the smell of alcohol and barbecue, echoing in the corridor.

Chen Zhuo walked to the wall at the deepest part of the tavern.

Two old blackboards hung quietly under the dim wall lamp.

Several cigarette butts and a few pieces of chalk, too short to hold, were scattered in the groove below the blackboard.

Chen Zhuo turned his head and took a few sheets of paper from a newly vacated table next to him.

He walked back to the center of the blackboard, took a tissue, and Chen Zhuo placed his hand on the blackboard and began to wipe it vigorously.

He wiped very carefully, erasing the messy graffiti bit by bit, and managed to erase a large, clean area in the very center of the blackboard.

The tissue paper turned black.

He casually tossed the dirty tissue into the trash can at his feet and picked out a slightly longer piece of white chalk.

Chen Zhuo did not turn around to look at David and the others, nor did he look at the few draft papers in his hand.

He raised his hand, and the tip of the chalk landed on the blackboard.

Chen Zhuo rotated his wrist and drew a continuous manifold surface on the left side of the blackboard. The lines were smooth and had a mathematical rhythm.

Next, in the middle of the surface, he drew a circle representing the break of the singularity.

He paused for a second after drawing the circle.

Then, the chalk was spread horizontally across the blackboard.

A horizontal line.

A vertical line.

Chen Zhuo didn't draw quickly, but every line he drew was very straight, and the spacing was extremely even.

In less than half a minute, a perfectly square grid appeared in the center of the blackboard, covering the circle that represented the singularity exactly.

After completing this step, Chen Zhuo held the chalk and slammed it down heavily at each intersection of the grid.

White solid dots are evenly distributed on the nodes of the grid.

Beside a table not far away.

David was holding a glass of dark beer, about to put it in his mouth, when his gaze inadvertently swept over the wall in the corner of the pub.

He stopped what he was doing.

The cup is suspended in mid-air.

"Was that the brick he borrowed from the physics department this afternoon?"

Sam followed David's gaze, still chewing the last bite of his hamburger, his cheeks bulging.

Allen also turned his head, his gaze passing over the crowd walking in the aisle and landing on the blackboard.

Physics students are very familiar with this kind of grid.

"The standard spacetime lattice."

Allen squinted and tossed the ketchup bag he was holding onto the table.

"He actually copied the string theory segmentation method verbatim."

Chen Zhuo did not hear their discussion.

After drawing the grid and nodes, he turned the chalk in his hand and changed to a slightly sharper edge.

He started writing next to those white nodes.

He did not use the gauge field notation commonly found in physics, nor the integral formula used to maintain the conservation of energy.

Instead, they are mapping matrices in algebraic geometry.

Chen Zhuo wrote very steadily.

He redefined each fragment of the continuous manifold after it was broken up using algebraic cycles.

Then he wrote the nonlinear tensor product on the grid lines.

He used these algebraic symbols to anchor those discrete nodes, attempting to reconnect them using purely mathematical relationships.

One line after another.

The originally simple and straightforward physical grid was quickly wrapped up by dense algebraic symbols that exuded cold logic.

David put down his wine glass.

The bottom of the cup touched the table with a soft sound.

Although he didn't study pure algebra, his background in geometry allowed him to instinctively perceive the weight of the matrices on the blackboard.

David stood up.

"Let's go take a look."

David didn't waste any more words and left his seat.

Sam and Allen exchanged a glance, picked up their respective cups, and followed behind David.

Several people walked through the passageway and came to the cramped old blackboard.

Chen Zhuo had just finished writing the convergence condition for the last row of the matrix.

He heard footsteps behind him, turned around, took a half step to the side, and made room for the center of the blackboard.

"Finished drawing?"

David glanced at Chen Zhuo's fingers, which were covered with a thin layer of chalk dust.

Chen Zhuo nodded.

"sketch."

Chen Zhuo's voice sounded gentle against the background of the rock music as he looked at the equations on the blackboard.

"Only the skeleton was built."

Allen stood directly in front of the blackboard, holding a half-finished glass of dark beer in his hand.

He did not look at Chen Zhuo.

His gaze was fixed on the grid on the blackboard.

I watched it for a full two minutes.

People were laughing and talking loudly in the bar, and the jukebox played an even louder song.

But the place where these people were standing was unusually quiet.

Allen's brows furrowed little by little, and the dark circles under his eyes seemed to have deepened due to this intense thinking.

He took a sip of beer and swallowed it.

"List."

Allen spoke, his tone completely devoid of the casualness and laziness he had displayed when discussing the Long Island villa trust earlier.

"You stole our scaffolding, but you also removed all the steel bars from it?"

Allen stretched out his free left hand and pointed to the white dots on the blackboard.

"Here, here, and here."

His finger slid between several algebraic nodes.

"You've broken up continuous space, that's fine, we often do that when dealing with quantum fluctuations."

Allen turned his head and looked at Chen Zhuo, his eyes filled with an expert's doubt.

"But where's your integral symbol?"

Allen's finger touched one of the nodes.

"What is this group mapping that you're attached to this node?"

He then pointed to an algebraic cluster symbol with a subscript next to him.

"You haven't defined a gauge field here, nor a graviton tensor, so what are you using to fill this point?"

Faced with a barrage of questions from the physics postdoctoral fellow, Chen Zhuo did not appear flustered.

He leaned against a pillar, holding the Montblanc pen in one hand.

"Abel Cluster".

Chen Zhuo followed Alan's finger and calmly gave a term from the field of pure algebra.

"I don't need to fill it with physical quantities."

Chen Zhuo looked at the grid on the blackboard.

"After breaking the manifold apart, if you try to calculate the energy and spin at the nodes, the computational cost will still lead back to the dead end of partial differential equations, so I stripped away the physical shell completely."

Chen Zhuo stepped forward.

He picked up the half piece of chalk that he had just placed in the blackboard tray.

He drew a line connecting the two nodes.

"I only kept the positional relationship."

Chen Zhuo's voice was not loud, but every word was clear.

"I used mappings from algebraic geometry to lock the two fragments together."

Chen Zhuo put the chalk back and patted the dust off his hands.

"As long as it can be proven that this algebraic relationship holds when the grid shrinks, the break in the Hodge conjecture can be repaired in the discrete state."

After listening to Chen Zhuo's words, Allen turned his gaze back to the connection line.

David stood to the side, nodding thoughtfully.

"Anchoring based on pure logic."

David said something softly.

"It is indeed based on the approach of algebraic geometry."

But the blackboard did not calm down because of this sentence.

This is just the beginning.

They work on computer topology algorithms, are not sensitive to physical symbols, but have an almost instinctive intuition for matrices and tensors.

Sam's eyes narrowed slightly.

In his mind, he translated the mathematical symbols written by Chen Zhuo line by line into algorithmic logic and data structures.

Time passed by, second by second.

The tavern was still noisy. Someone broke a glass at the bar, which drew a drunken whistle.

The people in front of the blackboard seemed to be in another world.

Five minutes later.

Allen tilted his head back and downed the last sip of stout in his glass.

He casually placed the empty cup on the windowsill next to him, making a crisp sound.

"That's a clever idea."

Allen turned around and looked at Chen Zhuo.

His eyes sharpened.

He stepped forward and picked up a small piece of red chalk from the chalk trough.

This is what someone left behind during graffiti just now.

Allen took a piece of red chalk and drew a large, heavy circle on the outermost edge of the square grid that Chen Zhuo had drawn.

"You've locked the nodes with algebraic mappings, trying to circumvent the computational complexity of continuous space. In a static state, this sketch looks perfect."

Allen's chalk tip stopped in the center of the grid.

"But, Chen."

Alan's voice sounded unusually cold amidst the noisy background noise.

"To prove the Hodge conjecture, you must make this discrete grid approximate the limit of continuity."

Allen exerted force with his wrist.

Several arrows pointing to the center were drawn on the blackboard with red chalk.

"You need to make the grid spacing close to zero."

Chen Zhuo stared at the red arrows, his eyes unwavering, and listened quietly.

"That's the problem."

Allen tapped one of the nodes hard twice with chalk.

"In order to bypass computation, you've stripped away the physical shell too cleanly. You've discarded the spin in the gauge field and the tension provided by the conservation of energy."

Alan looked into Chen Zhuo's eyes.

"In physics, without these things providing outward support, your net is soft."

Allen pressed his finger sharply on the center point.

"Once you start taking the limit, when the spacing shrinks infinitely, without spin and gravity to stabilize these algebraic nodes, the topology will collapse inwards instantly, like vacuum decay."

Allen drew a solid black vortex on the blackboard, directly covering the algebraic mapping that Chen Zhuo had originally written.

"It will become a black hole."

Allen threw the red chalk back into the trough.

"Your algebraic bridge, when it reaches halfway, will be completely crushed by its own gravity, along with these fragments."

Allen's verdict directly pierced the underlying logic of this model.

David frowned.

He knew Allen was right.

If the structure continuously contracts to its discrete limit, it will collapse without sufficient rigid support; this is an inviolable law.

Chen Zhuo remained leaning against the pillar.

There was no anger on his face after being exposed.

There was no sense of loss from having one's hard work rejected.

He even smiled slightly and nodded.

"Yes."

Chen Zhuo's voice was soft, but clear.

"This is what I was talking to David about in the hallway this afternoon. It's full of jumps and gaps. I borrowed your grid, but I removed the pillars supporting it."

Chen Zhuo looked at the collapsed point marked with a red circle.

"Without spin, it would indeed collapse."

Alan was taken aback by Chen Zhuo's frank attitude.

He originally thought that this prodigy who became famous at a young age would at least offer some explanation to save face, or use some profound mathematical terms to refute the laws of physics.

Before Allen could speak again, Sam spoke up from the other side.

"The collapse isn't the most critical issue."

Sam was still holding a half-full glass of beer, but he hadn't drunk a drop.

He took a step forward and stood directly in front of the algebraic matrices that Chen Zhuo had just written.

Sam didn't take the chalk.

He extended his somewhat thick finger and pointed it at a tensor product symbol with multiple subscripts.

"Alan said it would collapse."

Sam turned to look at Chen Zhuo, his tone even more direct than Allen's.

"Following your line of thinking as mathematicians, to prevent it from collapsing, you would definitely try to add an outer layer of algebraic constraints to forcibly anchor each node, right?"

Chen Zhuo looked at Sam and nodded.

"This is a standard algebraic repair technique," Chen Zhuo admitted.

Sam gave a cold laugh.

He pointed to the row of matrices on the blackboard.

"Chen, have you calculated the dimensional expansion rate of your matrix?"

Sam's fingers moved rapidly between several parameters.

"This is an extremely complex nonlinear tensor product. Every time the grid shrinks inward, the dimension of this matrix doubles in order to maintain what you call the algebraic correspondence."

Sam looked at Chen Zhuo as if he were a madman.

"You just heard me complaining that the Monte Carlo simulation crashes when it reaches the boundary."

Sam patted the blackboard.

It makes a popping sound.

"If you were to write this set of algebraic matrices into an algorithm to run the limit, its computational dimension would be ten thousand times more terrifying than the clumsy method we used."

Sam took a deep breath and made his final conclusion.

"You're not reducing the dimension."

Sam looked at Chen Zhuo's young face.

"You are creating a computing power black hole."

The tavern lights shone on the blackboard, making the grease stains gleam.

"Don't mention the 48-hour flight time."

Sam shook his head, his tone filled with despair.

"No supercomputer can run this matrix. Once it starts converging, it will completely overload all the memory within a ten-thousandth of a second."

Physicists say it will collapse.

Computer scientists say it cannot be calculated.

In the noisy Boston night, in front of this greasy blackboard of less than two square meters, the algebraic bridge that Chen Zhuo had spent an afternoon building was cornered by this group of top postdocs with the cruelest logic of reality.

David looked at the red arrows and dense tensor products on the blackboard and sighed.

"It seems that the bricks of physics aren't so easy to borrow."

David looked at Chen Zhuo, his tone tinged with regret.

Allen and Sam were also looking at Chen Zhuo.

They weren't targeting him; they were simply stating a fact that is self-evident in their respective fields.

Chen Zhuo stood there quietly.

He listened to Allen's theory of vacuum decay, and he also listened to Sam's warning about memory overload.

He didn't feel embarrassed.

That was why he came to this tavern.

These fatal flaws cannot be found by working in isolation; only by throwing the blueprints into the minds of these geniuses can the most authentic insights be extracted.

Chen Zhuo straightened up, his gaze falling on the red arrows and tensor products that represented a dead end.