My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 321 He's just lazy

3:15 PM.

Lujiazui, Shanghai.

Dense rain pounded on the panoramic glass curtain wall of the Shanghai World Financial Center's upper floors, gathering into winding streaks that fragmented the view of the Huangpu River outside the windows.

A thick, grayish-white fog shrouded the river, completely blocking out the whistles of several old-fashioned riverboats through their heavy, double-layered soundproof windows. Only the blurry, flickering red navigation lights could be seen in the rain.

This is the office area of ​​a foreign-invested quantitative hedge fund.

The spacious single-level apartment, spanning several hundred square meters, is covered with a dark gray anti-static carpet.

There was none of the noisy chatter of traders yelling into the phone like in TV dramas; the entire space was so quiet that only two sounds could be heard.

The central air conditioning vents emitted a low, even humming sound, along with the sound of hundreds of keyboards being typed.

Su Wei sat at the third workstation by the window.

She wore thin, black-rimmed glasses, and the screen's pale blue light shone on her expressionless face.

The foreign company had just switched to bulky Dell LCD monitors. Two monitors were placed side by side in front of Su Wei. On the left screen, a full-screen Excel spreadsheet was open, with green data refreshing like a waterfall. On the right screen, several red and green financial candlestick charts were slowly being generated.

Su Wei's left hand was on the keyboard shortcut keys, while her right hand held the mouse wheel, her index finger occasionally flicking it down.

In the corner between the keyboard and the monitor, there was a transparent plastic takeout box, which was her lunch for the day: a light salad.

Because I've been staring at the data from a backtesting model all morning, I've only eaten half of this salad so far.

The boiled chicken breast inside was dry and tough, and the purple cabbage and lettuce leaves had lost moisture, with the edges looking shriveled and yellow.

Su Wei slightly turned her head, her gaze still fixed on the fluctuation surface on the screen. She released the mouse with her right hand, picked up the white disposable plastic fork from the lunchbox, blindly poked a piece of purple cabbage, and put it in her mouth.

The purple cabbage made a slight chewing sound between my teeth, without any salad dressing, only a faint raw taste.

Ding Ding Ding ~

A crisp notification sound suddenly rang in Su Wei's headphones. At the same time, the blue and green MSN Messenger icon in the taskbar at the bottom right of the computer screen began to flash wildly.

Almost at the same second.

The sound of an office chair wheel scraping against an anti-static carpet came from the next workstation.

A woman wearing a camel-colored cashmere cardigan and with wavy hair, holding a Starbucks hot Americano, pushed off the ground with her toes and slid down to Su Wei's workstation, along with the expensive ergonomic chair.

This is the senior quantitative researcher sitting next to Su Wei; everyone in the department calls her Sister Qian.

As soon as Sister Qian slid over, she gently bumped the plastic partition on the edge of Su Wei's desk with her elbow.

"Hey, hey, Weiwei, stop staring at that stupid volatility table of yours!"

Sister Qian lowered her voice, but the expression on her face showed the excitement of having just heard a shocking piece of gossip.

"Quick, quick! Click the link I just sent you on MSN!"

Su Wei stopped chewing, took her left hand off the keyboard, and kept the plastic fork in her right hand. She turned her head and looked at Sister Qian with some confusion.

"What's wrong?"

Su Wei's voice was flat, slightly hoarse from not having drunk water for a long time.

"Breaking news! Hurry up and open it!"

Sister Qian was so excited that a little bit of her hot Americano dripped onto the soundproofing panel of her workstation.

"Today, the entire quantitative trading community, and all those IT people, are practically going crazy!"

Su Wei pushed up her thin-rimmed glasses, held the mouse in her left hand, moved the cursor to the lower right corner of the screen, and clicked on the flashing MSN icon.

A dialog box popped up, displaying a long webpage link that Sister Qian had just sent.

Suwei double-clicked the link.

The system's default Internet Explorer browser popped up. The company's network speed wasn't particularly fast, and the blue loading bar at the top of the page froze for two seconds before a BBS forum interface appeared on the screen.

The words "Shui Mu Tsinghua" are printed in the upper left corner of the page.

As soon as the page loaded, before Su Wei could even read the words, Sister Qian excitedly leaned over and grabbed the mouse from Su Wei's hand.

"Look at this headline, isn't it scary enough?"

Sister Qian frantically scrolled the mouse wheel downwards with her index finger.

The gray scrollbar on the webpage scrolled down rapidly.

This is a trending discussion that has already gone viral, with the post's title highlighted in large, bold red font by the poster, exuding a strong sensationalist style:

"The Myth of North American Computing Power Destroyed? Chinese Scholars Release Underlying Concurrency Architecture, Directly Overturning Silicon Valley's Table!"

The post has received over ten thousand replies, and the screen is filled with a frenzied discussion from various programmers, algorithm engineers, and pseudonyms from top universities.

"Let me tell you, it's been all over the MSN industry groups this morning!"

Sister Qian's fingernails tapped loudly on the edge of Su Wei's LCD screen.

"I heard that several top tech giants in the US, like Microsoft and IBM, as well as those major quantitative firms on Wall Street, held an all-night meeting last night and all modified their underlying engines based on open-source code. They practically single-handedly smashed the Americans' livelihoods to pieces!"

Su Wei looked at the scrolling highlighted text on the screen, her eyes showing little emotion, and simply listened quietly.

"But that's not the most amazing thing!"

Seeing Su Wei's calm demeanor, Sister Qian suddenly moved closer. She grabbed the mouse and scrolled the wheel down a large distance, stopping it on a picture that the poster had deliberately enlarged.

It was a screenshot of an academic paper written entirely in English.

At the very top of the screenshot, where the author's name is located, several English letters are clearly printed.

C. Zhuo.

"C. Zhuo! Did you see that?"

Sister Qian's eyes widened as she stared intently at Su Wei.

"This morning, insiders in academic circles on the internet have already dug up the information: this C. Zhuo is the 14-year-old genius Chen Zhuo who was interviewed on CCTV-1 last year and later went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton!"

Upon hearing those two words...

Su Wei's right hand, holding the plastic fork, paused very slightly in mid-air.

"Weiwei, I remember you were also in the USTC's gifted youth program, right?"

Sister Qian excitedly nudged Su Wei's chair armrest with her elbow, raising her voice by two octaves.

"This is a living advertisement for your university, your classmate! Right?!"

Su Wei didn't speak, her gaze remaining fixed on the few English letters on the computer screen.

"This is outrageous, holy crap!"

Sister Qian was completely absorbed in her shock and kept talking non-stop.

"The whole world, including our own media, thinks your genius is in seclusion at Princeton, obsessively working on some unfathomable mathematics! After all, he's the genius who broke through that Hodge conjecture, right?"

Sister Qian took a sip of her hot Americano to moisten her throat, then pointed at the screen.

"And the result? In these three papers that shook Silicon Valley, Chen Zhuo didn't write a single line of computer code! He was only responsible for the most crucial part—the pure mathematical foundation!"

"I heard that a computer science genius named Sam is in charge of the underlying concurrency scheduling, and a physics genius named Allen is in charge of high-dimensional manifold splicing. All their models and code only got working because they were based on Chen Zhuo's mathematical formula! The entire Silicon Valley and Wall Street are now worshipping this genius! How does his brain work like that?"

Su Wei remained silent.

Her gaze shifted from the letters C. Zhuo to the screenshot of the main text of Chen Zhuo's independent paper.

It was a LaTeX academic paper with extremely clean, even somewhat rigid, layout.

It is filled with a large number of topological symbols, high-dimensional space mapping formulas, and dense homology group derivations.

However, amidst these complex academic formulas that would make most people dizzy just by looking at them, the netizen who posted the message used Windows' built-in Paint software to draw a large red circle in the very center of the screenshot with an extremely crude red pen.

Within the red circle, there is no smooth calculus transition, nor any complex boundary condition proof.

There is only one line of extremely abrupt and rigid mathematical dimensionality reduction logic.

A capital constant letter.

C

And along with the letter C, there are several truncation operators that directly cut off all redundant variables that exceed the threshold, forcibly reducing the dimension to a discrete matrix.

Su Wei stared at the screen, at the constant C truncation operator in the red circle, for a full three seconds.

The rain outside the office building window seemed to be getting heavier, with raindrops pounding against the glass in dense bursts, creating a dull white noise.

Su Wei gently placed the white plastic fork back into the unfinished salad box with her left hand.

She removed her right hand from the mouse and picked up a black ballpoint pen that had been sitting on the table for taking notes.

She didn't look at Sister Qian's expectant face filled with gossip, nor did she reach for the water glass next to her.

She simply turned the black ballpoint pen between her right fingers upside down by half a turn, with the nib pointing upwards and the cap downwards.

Her wrists naturally fell onto the black leather tablecloth on the edge of the desk.

Holding the pen upside down, I tapped the edge of the desk mat twice with the cap, neither too hard nor too soft.

Tap. Tap.

Two very faint, rhythmic taps were drowned out by the dense keyboard clatter around her, and no one noticed them except herself.

Su Wei's gaze remained fixed on the line of formula on the screen that was circled in red, indicating a crude truncation.

The eyelashes behind the glasses trembled slightly.

Then, her lips, which had been pressed tightly together, were slightly pulled upwards uncontrollably at the right corner of her lips.

It was a very shallow curve, not even a complete smile.

It lingered on Su Wei's face, which usually appeared aloof and rational in the office, for less than a second before quickly disappearing again.

"Look at these comments."

Sister Qian was completely unaware of Su Wei's subtle movement and expression just now.

She grabbed the mouse again and scrolled down the SMTH BBS page, pointing to the hundreds of replies that had already been posted.

"The programmers working on low-level tasks online and the university professors are all cursing under the posts now."

Sister Qian pointed to one of the comments with the most likes and read it aloud.

"This step is way too brutal! Without any mathematical logic to support it, it just defines a constant and cuts it off in one fell swoop? This is completely inconsistent with the rigorous and fastidious style of mathematicians! What on earth was this genius thinking when he wrote this?"

After Qian finished reading, she turned the computer screen slightly towards Su Wei, pursed her lips, and shook her head.

"Weiwei, do you think that monsters like you from the gifted youth program all have that... that peculiar tendency to return to simplicity? This writing is so unreasonable, it doesn't even leave the reader with a proof process."

Upon hearing this, Su Wei turned around and looked away from the ShuiMu Community website.

She reached out and grabbed the mouse, clicked the red "X" in the upper right corner of the page, closed Internet Explorer, and switched back to her two dark blue monitors.

Looking at the boring Excel spreadsheet on the left that keeps scrolling downwards.

She reached out her right hand, picked up the plastic fork from the salad box again, speared a lettuce leaf from it, and put it in her mouth.

The lettuce leaves made a crisp chewing sound in her mouth. She chewed them slowly a couple of times and then swallowed them.

"He's just afraid of trouble."

Su Wei's voice finally rang out in the corner of that small workstation.

Her tone was extremely casual, without any awe at hearing about a world-class academic breakthrough, nor any excitement as a classmate eager to show off.

It's like she's complaining about an ordinary guy sitting behind her who just lent her an eraser.

"He doesn't care about the computer system's memory overflow or anything. He just thinks traditional mathematical derivations are too troublesome and annoying because they get stuck there. He's too lazy to wait."

As Su Wei spoke, she scrolled the mouse wheel with her right hand to check for an abnormal data in row 270 of the table.

She stared at the data and casually added a comment.

"In order to finish work early and go to the cafeteria for a quick meal, he just copied a mathematical shortcut on a piece of paper and cut off all the useless and redundant variables. As for what kind of code others use his formula to write, he probably doesn't care at all."

When Sister Qian heard this, she was stunned for a moment, and then she burst out laughing.

"Oh my, Xiao Su."

Sister Qian held the hot Americano, her shoulders shaking with laughter.

"Listen to your tone, it's so nonchalant! It's like you've personally witnessed this coding genius writing code, and seen him complain about how troublesome it is."

Sister Qian took a sip of coffee and joked.

"That was a groundbreaking discovery that overturned the foundation of Silicon Valley's computing power. How come in your mouth it's just a shortcut?"

Su Wei typed a few numbers on the keyboard with her left hand to correct the abnormal data.

She didn't turn to look at Sister Qian; she kept staring at the screen, her voice so calm it was completely unwavering.

"Back when I was in school."

Su Wei stopped typing, picked up the ceramic mug with the company logo on it, brought it to her lips, took a sip of warm water, and swallowed lightly.

She put down her water glass and, amidst the continuous sound of rain outside the window, softly finished the second half of her sentence:

"He used this trick to help me get by on my teacher's assignments so that I wouldn't have to write out those tedious and pointless steps."

The sound of keyboards clicking continued in the office area, and the cold air from the air conditioner vents rustled a printed document on the corner of Su Wei's desk.

Sister Qian's hand holding the coffee cup froze in mid-air, her smile stiffened for a moment, and then she clicked her tongue in an extremely exaggerated manner.

"Truly a monster worthy of being from your USTC's gifted youth program..."

Sister Qian rolled her eyes and pursed her lips, clearly taking Su Wei's words as the kind of banter between academic high-achievers, full of Versailles flavor.

"Alright, alright, I can't afford to mess with you geniuses. They're cutting computing power foundations with constants in Boston, while you're cutting a low-fat salad with a fork in Lujiazui. We all have bright futures."

Sister Qian muttered to herself, tapped the anti-static carpet with her toe, and slid back to her workstation, chair and all.

"I have to run that US stock options hedging model again this morning. Today is just unbearable..."

Qian's complaints gradually faded behind the desk partition, then turned into the monotonous sound of keyboard typing that filled the surroundings.

The less than two-square-meter workstation where Su Wei worked has regained the tranquility typical of foreign company employees.

Everything was as if nothing had happened.

There is no apocalypse, no computing power collapse, only the endless financial data that Lujiazui can never finish processing.

Su Wei ignored the commotion at the next workstation.

She threw the plastic fork she was holding into the salad box, closed the lid, and pushed it to the corner of the table.

Then, she reached out and gripped the mouse again.

Before continuing to check the next row of Excel data, Su Wei's gaze involuntarily drifted to the tiny date display in the lower right corner of the screen and on the taskbar.

Friday, 2005.

It must be late at night in Boston now.

She looked at the pale blue light on the computer screen.

In her mind, those few lines of extremely crude, extremely barbaric, and completely mathematically devoid of any mathematical reasoning constant C cutoff formula were like a note that had crossed the Pacific Ocean, quietly affixed to her retina.

In this world where billions of people are going crazy over that paper, she is probably the only one who can see with extreme clarity, amidst those cold, high-dimensional topological symbols and machine language, that yawning boy twirling a pen in his hand, his face screaming "If I can't figure it out, I'll just cut it off."

The outside world looks up to that great god who changed the world.

On this gloomy, rainy afternoon, by a glass of warm water in Lujiazui, she savored the boy's unchanging mischievousness and authenticity.

Su Wei tightened her grip on the mouse slightly.

Once again, the corners of her mouth curved upwards very slowly and very gently.

This time, the smile lingered for a much longer time than before.

She turned her gaze back to the fluctuating candlestick charts and volatility surfaces.

Outside the window, the thick fog over the Huangpu River remained, and the autumn raindrops pattered against the glass curtain wall.

And on this ordinary afternoon, Su Wei's keyboard clicks rang out once again, steady and quiet.

Regarding the lottery

The lucky draw will be held on the evening of the 7th.

Thank you all so much for voting on the last day.