My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 309: The Story Begins

MIT, Computer Architecture Lab.

The air conditioning in the server room was turned up high, and rows of black server racks emitted a continuous, low hum.

At the desk by the window sat a young assistant professor wearing a plaid shirt, holding half a cold bread spread with peanut butter in his left hand and a mouse in his right.

On the computer screen, the computer category page of the ArXiv preprint website was open.

He took a bite of bread and casually rolled the bread roller.

My gaze swept across the list of newly uploaded papers.

Stop.

He swallowed the bread in his mouth and opened the abstract of one of the papers.

A few seconds later, he put the remaining bread back into the bag and grabbed a tissue to wipe his hands.

He placed his hands on the keyboard.

He clicked on the PDF attachment of the paper, scrolled directly to the third page, and stopped at a piece of pseudocode marked with curly braces and arrows.

The sound of keyboard clicks filled the computer room.

He looked at the PDF while rapidly typing the code into his compiler.

Define variables, create pointers, and allocate memory.

He paused halfway through typing, his fingers faltering slightly, his brow furrowing.

He glanced at the code on the screen, then at the PDF.

He pressed the backspace key, deleted the two lines he had just typed, and, strictly following the logic in the paper, typed out a new truncation command.

Ten minutes later, the last line of code was entered.

He took his hands off the keyboard, picked up the mouse, and moved it to the Run button in the upper right corner of the screen.

Press down with your index finger.

"despair."

A black console window popped up at the bottom of the screen.

The white log entries began to scroll upwards rapidly.

He picked up the half-empty cup of cold coffee on the table, brought it to his lips, and stared at the black window.

The scrolling speed is getting faster and faster.

The system began simulating a data deluge with tens of millions of concurrent connections.

Based on his past experience, when the amount of data exceeds the extreme point of memory allocation, a glaring red error warning will pop up on the console, and then the entire system will freeze due to memory overflow.

He took a sip of coffee.

The log is still scrolling.

ten seconds.

Twenty seconds.

Half a minute passed.

The white code on the console is still refreshing at a steady rate, with no red warnings or lag.

The massive amount of data, enough to overwhelm the entire architecture, was folded and digested silently when the truncation instruction was executed, as if flowing into a bottomless pit.

"drop--"

The progress bar is full.

At the bottom of the black console, a line of bold green text appeared:

Simulation complete. Zero memory leak.

The coffee cup in his hand stopped in mid-air.

He neither drank the coffee nor put the cup down.

He held the cup up and stared intently at the line of green text for a full minute.

He then slowly placed the coffee cup on the table.

The bottom of the cup collided with the table, making a soft sound.

He picked up the landline phone on the table and dialed an internal number.

The phone rang five times before being answered.

"It's 7:30 in the morning. You'd better wait until your server crashes before you make this call."

A slightly hoarse, middle-aged man's voice came from the other end of the phone.

"Boss, you need to come to the server room right away."

The young assistant professor looked at the screen and spoke at a steady pace.

There was a two-second silence on the other end of the phone.

"What happened?"

"A paper about low-level scheduling was just published on ArXiv. I followed his pseudocode and ran it on our simulator with tens of millions of concurrent requests."

"And the result? Which floor are you stuck on?"

"No card."

The assistant professor looked at the line of green text.

"The progress bar is full, and the system has not overflowed."

The sound of fabric rubbing came from the other end of the phone, as if someone had sat up in bed.

"No overflow? Where did all that redundant data go?"

"He folded it directly using algebraic logic. He didn't allocate memory; he directly defined that part of the data in the quotient space."

The assistant professor paused for a moment.

"Boss, you'd better come over right away, and bring the whole algorithm team with you. If this pseudocode can also run on the hardware, then our current server underlying architecture will be completely useless."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes."

The phone hangs up.

The assistant professor put down the microphone, placed his hands back on the keyboard, and began to break down the code line by line.

......

Theoretical Physics Department, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research).

In the lounge area at the end of the corridor, a coffee machine was hissing with steam.

Two researchers in white lab coats stood around a round table.

On the round table were a dozen or so A4 sheets of paper, still slightly warm, that had just been taken out of the printer.

That was a paper that Allen uploaded to the ArXiv physics forum.

"Snapped!"

One of the researchers, who had a beard, slapped one of the pages on the paper.

"That doesn't make sense!"

He pointed to a formula on the paper, his voice loud enough to echo in the empty corridor.

"In an eleven-dimensional string-membrane field, is an algebraic wall forcibly built to truncate the boundary? Where does the missing mass go? Is the law of conservation of energy simply absorbed at this extreme point?"

Another researcher wearing gold-rimmed glasses stood opposite.

He didn't refute it, but instead reached out and turned the stack of papers back two pages.

"Look here."

The man with the gold-rimmed glasses pointed to the derivation process behind him with his index finger.

"Don't worry about where the mass went for now. Just follow this cutoff condition and calculate from there, treating the wall as a known condition and substituting it in."

The bearded researcher frowned and looked in the direction he was pointing.

His gaze moved over the complex physical field equations.

After looking at it for a while, he looked up and then looked down again.

"It's self-consistent."

The man with the gold-rimmed glasses looked at him and lowered his voice.

"He made an unreasonable cut in front, but afterwards, the entire framework of the eleven-dimensional topology miraculously closed up. There was no divergence, no collapse."

The bearded researcher shook his head, gripping the edge of the table with both hands.

"This is impossible! This is pure mathematical fraud. The physical universe could not allow such an illogical truncation to exist. This is using algebraic rules to rape physical fields!"

"But he managed to make it consistent."

The gold-rimmed glasses repeated itself.

"This is just a derivation on a piece of paper!"

The man with the beard raised his voice.

The man with the gold-rimmed glasses did not respond.

He turned around and walked toward the internal communication phone on the corridor wall.

He picked up the receiver and dialed a number.

"Front desk, reserve conference room number three for me, immediately."

The man with the gold-rimmed glasses looked at the stack of papers on the round table.

"Notify everyone in the High-Dimensional Topology Group and the String Theory Group that all routine work this afternoon is suspended. Have them bring draft paper and pens and come to Conference Room 3."

"What are we supposed to do?" came the question from the other end of the phone.

"We need to verify the calculations of a wall."

The man with the gold-rimmed glasses hung up the phone.

He walked back to the round table, arranged the dozen or so sheets of paper, and held them in his hand.

The bearded researcher looked at him.

The two of them didn't say anything more and turned to walk towards the conference room.

......

Boston, Harvard University Department of Mathematics.

Professor Laurent's office door was tightly closed.

The ashtray on the desk was already crammed with seven or eight cigarette butts.

In the mesh wastebasket at my feet, there were more than a dozen crumpled pieces of draft paper.

Laurent sat in a large leather chair, his back ramrod straight.

Before him lay Chen Zhuo's fifteen-page thesis on the foundation of pure algebra.

Laurent held a pen in his right hand, the nib hovering above a quotient space mapping formula on the second page.

He stared at the formula for a long time.

He then wrote two lines of proof by contradiction on a blank piece of paper next to him.

When I got to the third line, the pen stopped.

The red ink slowly spread on the paper, turning into a small dot.

Laurent looked at the two lines of counter-evidence he had written.

The logic doesn't hold up.

The barrier of that algebraic loop was too thick; his proof by contradiction was bounced back when it encountered the truncation boundary and could not form a closed loop.

Laurent thought for a moment, then drew two thick horizontal lines on the draft paper with a red pen, crossing out the two lines of derivation.

He did not give up.

From a different perspective, Laurent rewrote a geometric analysis formula, attempting to dismantle the constant wall from the side of the continuous manifold.

Five minutes later, the sound of pens stopping again.

Laurent looked at the results on the paper.

It still doesn't work.

He put down the red pen in his hand.

The pen rolled onto the table with a soft thud.

Laurent stretched out his hands, took off his reading glasses from the bridge of his nose, placed them on the table, and vigorously rubbed his brow with two fingers.

The only sound in the office was the ticking of the clock on the wall.

Laurent took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

He picked up the internal landline phone on the table and dialed his secretary's number.

"Notify all the professors in the geometry analysis group, as well as those postdocs."

Laurent's voice was deep.

"Cancel this morning's regular seminar."

"Professor Laurent, what happened?"

The secretary asked on the phone.

"Have them come to my office right now."

Laurent looked at the fifteen pages of paper on the table.

"Take all the reference books on algebraic geometry and topology that they can find."

"Okay, Professor."

Laurent hung up the phone.

He put his reading glasses back on, picked up the red fountain pen, crumpled the draft paper covered in red lines into a ball, and accurately threw it into the wastepaper basket at his feet.

He pulled out a new blank sheet of draft paper and spread it out in front of him.

......

The apartment door was opened.

Chen Zhuo walked out of the building.

The air in Boston is cool at eight o'clock in the morning.

Chen Zhuo took a deep breath, and the cold air entered his lungs through his nasal cavity, making his entire chest feel refreshed.

He ran along the street outside the apartment towards the Charles River.

He didn't walk fast, maintaining a steady pace.

Chen Zhuo's hands swayed naturally with his steps. He wasn't wearing headphones, nor was he looking around.

Look straight ahead.

Maintain a breathing pattern of two steps for each inhale and two steps for each exhale.

White mist gathered and dispersed around his mouth with each breath.

After running for about ten minutes, the Charles River came into view.

The river was wide and the current was gentle. The morning sunlight shone on the river, creating a layer of fine, golden ripples.

Chen Zhuo continued running along the riverside path. Several other people who were also jogging passed by him. They didn't know each other and just kept their own pace.

A fine layer of sweat began to appear on his forehead.

Chen Zhuo raised his hand and wiped his forehead with the towel draped around his neck.

He kept running, the sound of his footsteps, his breathing, and the rustling of the wind through the leaves.

After half an hour.

Chen Zhuo gradually slowed down, changing from jogging to brisk walking.

He walked another hundred meters or so and stopped in front of a breakfast cart by the river.

The owner of the handcart was a chubby, middle-aged white man who was cracking eggs onto a hot plate.

Chen Zhuo walked to the food cart.

"A cup of coffee and a sandwich, please."