My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 324 Three Hundred People

Chen Zhuo carried a plastic bag with the bright red logo of a domestic supermarket in one hand and two steaming 12-inch Italian sausage pizzas he had just bought from the street corner in the other. He slowly walked towards David's apartment, stepping on the fallen leaves.

Chen Zhuo was in a pretty good mood as he walked back from the office of a visiting scholar in the Harvard Mathematics Department.

The handmade chive and pork dumplings, along with the banter from Professors Zhu and Cao, made him feel much more relaxed.

"I wonder if those two guys starved to death."

Chen Zhuo walked to the door of David's apartment, muttering to himself as he freed his hand from the pizza and took out his key to insert into the lock.

The door was pushed open.

Chen Zhuo originally thought that what awaited him would be Sam and Allen howling like wolves because of hunger, or the sound of them arguing and tormenting each other in front of the whiteboard over a certain line of code.

However, the apartment was unusually quiet.

Chen Zhu changed his shoes, picked up his things, and walked into the living room.

There was another person in the living room.

David, who had been running around these past few days working on this three-in-one architecture and coordinating various resources, is back.

Instead of his usual casual sweater, David wore a meticulously tailored haute couture suit.

However, at this moment, the expensive suit jacket was casually thrown on the back of the sofa, and David's silk tie was also loose and hanging crookedly around his neck.

He was completely sunk into the armchair. In front of him, the huge glass coffee table, which had been piled high with pizza boxes and Red Bull cans, had been pushed to the edge.

Instead, there was a thick stack of documents.

Sam and Allen, sitting opposite David, no longer looked at the whiteboard filled with concurrent scheduling and physical manifolds.

They sat obediently on the carpet like two defeated roosters, each holding a few pieces of paper in their hands.

Hearing Chen Zhuo enter, the three of them looked up at the same time.

"Chen, you're finally back."

David took a deep breath and reached up to rub his wildly throbbing temples.

Without asking any further questions, he simply walked to the central island counter and put down the red plastic bag he was carrying.

Then he went back to the living room and placed the two still-steaming sausage pizzas on the edge of the coffee table.

"Let's eat something first."

Chen Zhuo opened the pizza box, and the rich aroma of cheese and roasted meat instantly filled the living room.

Sam and Allen usually ravenously eye pizza, but today, they only glanced at it, their throats bobbing, but neither of them reached out to take it.

David, however, was quite unceremonious. He leaned over, grabbed a slice of pizza that was still stretching, took a big bite, chewed it a couple of times, and swallowed it, as if he were just replenishing his body with carbohydrates to keep it functioning.

"The situation is very good, exceptionally good."

David swallowed the food in his mouth, picked up a glass of cold water from the coffee table and drank half of it, his eyes fixed on Chen Zhuo.

"The speed and destructive power of those three papers you posted online far exceeded my wildest predictions."

David pointed his finger forcefully at the mountain of documents piled up on the coffee table.

"These past few days, I've been practically living in the joint office of Harvard and MIT. I originally thought this was just a high-level, closed-door academic exchange, and I had even rented that small, high-end conference room that could only accommodate one hundred people."

"But this morning, the entire plan was scrapped."

David stood up, paced anxiously around the coffee table for a couple of steps, and then suddenly turned around.

"The originally planned small conference room was canceled, and the location of the joint seminar between the three universities, which was scheduled for two weeks later, was forcibly changed to MIT's famous Lecture Hall No. 3."

"All three hundred seats were occupied."

David braced his hands on the glass coffee table, staring intently at Chen Zhuo, Sam, and Allen sitting opposite him.

Do you know what this means?

A near-mad light gleamed in David's eyes.

"These three hundred seats are the result of countless arguments with those old fogies in the academic affairs office these past few days, and we only managed to secure this number after firmly sticking to the minimum requirements!"

"The presidents of the top ten quantitative funds on Wall Street waved checks for millions of dollars, trying to buy a seat in the back row to sit in the audience. CEOs of second-tier internet companies in Silicon Valley even used their connections with members of Congress to pressure the school to get a ticket."

"I kicked them all out!"

David gritted his teeth and said, enunciating each word clearly.

"I told the academic affairs office that this was a purely technical seminar, not a capitalist's marketplace! Anyone who doesn't understand the underlying logic or the mathematical foundations is strictly forbidden from entering!"

Upon hearing this, Sam, who was sitting on the carpet, couldn't help but let out a cold laugh.

"Well done, David."

Sam picked up a slice of pizza and took a big bite.

"This is the key to my Turing Award. I don't want those idiots who only have stock codes in their heads and can't even write C to pollute my conference room. Their presence in the audience is an insult to this great architecture."

Allen nodded and pushed up his glasses that had slipped off his nose.

"Capitalists aren't scary. Even if all the CEOs in America came, as long as they couldn't understand the formulas on the whiteboard, they'd just be a bunch of suit-wearing idiots in the audience. The real scary thing isn't them."

Allen scratched his already messy hair, a hint of anxiety in his voice.

"David, I've looked at the admission list you gave us."

Allen picked up the few sheets of paper in his hand, his hands trembling slightly.

"Half of those people are the chairs of the computer science and physics departments at top universities like Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford! Among them are several veterans who have won the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize!"

Allen covered his face.

"David, you have no idea how difficult these old men are! They are extremely rigorous in their academic pursuits, even to the point of being abnormal! If, in two weeks, we get stuck on one step of the derivation while explaining high-dimensional manifold splicing on stage, or forget to write a parameter for the boundary condition..."

Sam chimed in, his earlier disdain vanishing, replaced by a terrible headache.

"Exactly! David, if it's investors, I can paint a rosy picture, talk about a vision to change the world, but with these seasoned industry veterans... writing the wrong formula at an academic conference is a capital offense! These people are nitpicking with magnifying glasses, even microscopes!"

David sighed heavily as he watched these two top postdoctoral fellows trembling under the scrutiny of their peers.

"You only saw half of the people on that list."

David slumped back into the armchair, his hands clasped on his knees.

"Sam, Allen, the pressure on your engineering and physics teams is indeed immense. Once it gets going, those academic old fogies will at most nitpick the details and criticize you a bit, but they can't overturn the fact that the engineering loop is closed."

David's gaze slowly shifted from Sam and Allen, finally settling on Chen Zhuo, who had been standing quietly beside the central island.

"Chen, the real eye of the storm at this seminar isn't their code at all."

David pointed to the thick folders on the coffee table marked "Top Secret".

"The other half of this list of 300 people are chief architects and core lab directors from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and those established tech giants that are monopolizing the global server market."

David's voice became low, as if every word carried an immense weight of pressure.

"These savvy and powerful figures have all boarded planes to Boston this morning."

"They personally joined forces to exert pressure to take away the other half of these three hundred closed-door seats. They are not here to worship your structure, much less to humbly learn from it."

David pointed at Chen Zhuo, his tone urgent.

"For the past week, these tech giants have deployed tens of thousands of supercomputers in their underground labs in an attempt to exhaustively deconstruct this triadic architecture! They want to replicate it, to plagiarize it, and to turn this set of rules that can transcend the limits of computing power into their own!"

Upon hearing this, Sam and Allen were stunned. They stopped chewing their pizza and looked at David in disbelief.

"But they can't do it."

David gave a cold laugh, but there was no trace of ease in that laugh.

"Because they desperately discovered that no matter how they optimized the compilation path, no matter how they went around it, all the data flow would eventually get stuck at that insurmountable singularity, which is the mathematical foundation Chen wrote, that completely unreasonable constant C truncation operator."

David patted the patent pool definition documents on the table.

"As long as they can't circumvent this mathematical foundation, every new server they develop, every new system they create, will have to pay extremely high licensing fees to our patent pool if they dare to use a similar architecture! Getting money out of their pockets is harder than killing them!"

David took a deep breath and stared intently at Chen Zhuo.

"So, Chen, when Sam and Allen talk about engineering and physics at the seminar, that's just the appetizer."

"The final ten minutes, your math defense session on stage, are the real highlight of this report!"

David stood up and walked over to Chen Zhuo.

"Those top executives and chief architects from those giants will form the strongest alliance behind the scenes. Their sole purpose is to, under the watchful eyes of everyone and based on academic logic, relentlessly pursue your constant C!"

"They will stop at nothing to find flaws in your mathematical logic! As long as they can prove that your mathematical singularity is invalid, or that there is even the slightest logical flaw..."

David gritted his teeth and spoke slowly and deliberately.

"Then they can legitimately tear down the patent barriers of this architecture, declare that this underlying logic is flawed common sense, and at that point, they will be like a group of sharks smelling blood, devouring this architecture completely!"

Quiet.

David's words laid bare the brutal truth of the seminar for everyone.

This is not a friendly academic salon.

This is a brutal arena that concerns trillions of dollars in future technology output and the life and death of tech giants!

Sam and Allen looked at Chen Zhuo with not only fear of the old academic, but also shock at the massive commercial machinations he was witnessing.

They finally understood why David's eyes had been so red these past few days.

Three hundred of the world's smartest and most powerful minds.

Half of them are academic geniuses who nitpick with a magnifying glass.

Half of them are tech giants that came with knives to smash the market.

And all of them ultimately aimed their shots at that young Asian man standing next to the central island platform.

In this oppressive atmosphere that was enough to suffocate one.

Chen Zhuo made a move.

He didn't look as serious as David, nor did he breathe as rapidly as Sam.

He didn't even say anything as meaningless as "I understand" or "I'll be ready."

Under the watchful eyes of three pairs of tense people.

Chen Zhuo simply turned around and spread the red plastic bag out on the table.

It makes a rattling sound like plastic.

He took out a glass jar with a red cap and a picture of Lao Gan Ma (a popular Chinese chili sauce brand) printed on it from the bag.

A rich, slightly charred aroma of chili oil instantly filled the air, mixing with the cheese flavor of the pizza to create an extremely strange chemical reaction.

Chen Zhuo picked up a slice of Italian sausage pizza from the coffee table.

He used a small iron spoon to scoop a large spoonful of chili oil sauce from the glass jar.

Then, under the horrified gazes of Sam, Allen, and David...

Chen Zhuo naturally and seriously spread the spoonful of Lao Gan Ma chili sauce evenly on the surface of the Western-style pizza.

The chili oil flowed down the melted cheese, looking both intense and tempting.

Chen Zhuo picked up the Lao Gan Ma pizza, brought it to his mouth, and took a big bite without hesitation.

The crispiness of the bread, the richness of the cheese, and the intense spiciness of Lao Gan Ma chili sauce exploded in your mouth.

Chen Zhuo squinted his eyes in satisfaction, chewed carefully twice, and swallowed.

Then, holding the half-eaten pizza, he turned around and looked at David, who was covered in sweat and looked like he was facing a formidable enemy.

"In mathematics, it's not about who shouts the loudest or who has the most people that you can win."

"Whether there are three hundred people or three thousand people, numbers are meaningless in the face of truth."

Chen Zhuo took a second bite of pizza, chewing as he looked at the thick stack of admission lists on the coffee table.

"If they're not convinced and want to nitpick logically, then let them nitpick."

Chen Zhu swallowed the food in his mouth, took a tissue and wiped away the little bit of red oil that had accidentally gotten on the corner of his mouth, his tone calm and resolute.

"If they can overturn that singularity, that's their skill; I'll offer this framework to them with both hands."

Chen Zhu crumpled the tissue into a ball and threw it with great precision into the trash can a meter away.

"Can't be overturned..."

Chen Zhuo looked at David, a very faint smile curving his lips.

"From now on, you'll obediently pay the patent fees."

In the afternoon, sunlight streamed through the blinds, casting a play of light and shadow on Chen Zhuo's profile.

The calmer his tone, the more chilling it became to Sam and Allen.

That's an absolute confidence.

David stared at Chen Zhuo holding the pizza for a full five seconds, stunned.

My temples, which had been throbbing wildly from continuous travel and immense pressure, miraculously calmed down the moment I heard those words.

David suddenly laughed.

He let out a long sigh, ripped off the loose silk tie from his neck, and tossed it casually onto the pile of confidentiality agreements.

"it is good."

David nodded heavily, a renewed flame of excitement burning in his eyes.

"Then let's wait for them to come and push it in Lecture Hall 3 at MIT."

"But Chen, what the hell is that stuff you've put on this pizza?"

David looked at the bright red pancake in Chen Zhuo's hand and couldn't help but swallow.

"This smells... kind of peculiar?"

"A specialty of China".

Chen Zhuo handed over the remaining half of the pizza, raising an eyebrow.

"Want to try some?"

Sam and Allen exchanged a glance, and the sense of despair they had felt just moments before vanished completely thanks to the sudden change in the atmosphere.

"Give me one too."

Sam wiped his hands and came closer.