"Use algebra."
Chen Zhuo said as he wrote, his voice clear in the spacious room.
"Treat that three-dimensional, streamlined high-speed train nose as a simple topological manifold. Then, find a set of polynomials to map it into an algebraic space."
Chen Zhuo wrote down a complex set of homology group mapping formulas.
Zhang Yuan stared at the whiteboard, his mind struggling to keep up.
He was one of the country’s top engineering PhDs and was very proficient in applied mathematics. Calculus, partial differential equations, even traditional linear algebra—he had mastered them all.
But he rarely encountered highly abstract fields of pure mathematics like algebraic geometry.
Looking at the incomprehensible script of letters, circles, and squares on the whiteboard, Zhang Yuan felt a headache coming on.
"Chen Zhuo, hold on a second."
Zhang Yuan couldn’t help but interrupt, raising a hand to rub his temples.
"This stuff you’re talking about—algebraic varieties, homology mappings... I don’t really get it. It’s too abstract."
Zhang Yuan pointed at the whiteboard.
"Let me ask you a practical question. How is this theory of yours going to solve our server crashes? How is it going to get us on the supercomputer in nine days?"
Chen Zhuo stopped writing.
He turned his head, looked at Zhang Yuan’s anxious and bewildered state, and suddenly smiled.
"Zhang Yuan, you don’t speak pure math, so let’s try a different language."
Chen Zhuo tossed the piece of chalk in his hand a couple of times, walked over to Zhang Yuan, pulled over the chair, and sat on it backward, resting his arms on the backrest.
"When you’re writing low-level code and you run into forty million mesh points, how do you usually handle it?" Chen Zhuo asked.
"How else? We build a 3D array, input all the coordinate points, and then write a massive nested loop to make the machine iterate and calculate the boundary conditions for each point, one by one."
Zhang Yuan answered instinctively.
"And that’s why you get a memory overflow, right?"
"Of course! Forty million nodes, and every iteration requires high-order matrix multiplication. Even a god’s computer would have an overflow."
Zhang Yuan said irritably.
Chen Zhuo nodded.
He stretched out his hand, pointing to the algebraic formulas on the whiteboard that Zhang Yuan had found so incomprehensible.
"Those formulas, translated into C++ or Fortran that you can understand, mean just one thing."
Chen Zhuo’s smile vanished. His tone became extremely serious, even revealing a hint of coldness.
"Completely delete the mesh generation module from your code."
The lab fell silent in an instant.
Zhang Yuan stood frozen, his mouth slightly agape, as if he hadn’t heard Chen Zhuo correctly.
Lin Fang was stunned as well.
"Delete it? Delete the mesh generation module? Then what do we use to build the model of the train’s nose?"
"Polynomial coefficients."
Chen Zhuo looked at them and said, enunciating every word.
"The purpose of this algebraic mapping is to turn that complex geometric nose cone into a few variables. You won’t need to input forty million coordinate points into the code."
Chen Zhuo stood up, walked to the whiteboard, and drew a line under one of the formulas with his chalk.
"In the new low-level code, the surface of the nose cone is just a few simple sets of algebraic polynomials."
He turned to look at Zhang Yuan.
"When the fluid flows over the nose, in the computer’s underlying logic, it’s no longer colliding with over forty million fragments."
Chen Zhuo tapped the whiteboard with the chalk.
"Instead, the computer directly solves these few sets of algebraic equations. Solve the equations, get the result."
Zhang Yuan’s eyes widened bit by bit.
Chen Zhuo looked at him and delivered the final, killer line.
"Since there won’t even be a single mesh in the code, eliminating tens of millions of data calls..."
Chen Zhuo tilted his head slightly, his gaze sharp.
"Zhang Yuan, will your memory still overflow?"
Those few sentences were like a bolt of lightning, splitting open the fog of confusion in Zhang Yuan’s mind.
In that instant, Zhang Yuan’s intuition as a top-tier engineering PhD was completely ignited.
No mesh.
Solve the equations directly.
Zhang Yuan’s breathing instantly grew heavy. He stared intently at the symbols on the whiteboard—the same ones that had seemed like gibberish moments ago—but now his eyes were looking at them as if they were a gold mine.
’If this logic can be successfully translated into an engineering application, then the computational barrier will truly cease to exist!’
This pure mathematics toolkit had just shattered the physical shackles of fluid dynamics from the ground up.
"It could work..."
Zhang Yuan muttered to himself, his slightly trembling hands propped on the table.
"This approach could work. No mesh generation, just direct algebraic calculation..."
He whipped his head around to look at Chen Zhuo, his eyes filled with a feverish excitement.
"Chen Zhuo, how is your brain even wired? How did you ever think of turning the nose cone into a few equations?"
Chen Zhuo didn’t respond to the praise.
He walked to the desk, picked up his notebook, and opened it.
"Zhang Yuan, calm down. It’s not time to pop the champagne just yet."
Chen Zhuo tapped an empty space in the notebook with his finger.
"Like I said before, this is a defective product. It has many logical holes in its mathematical framework that haven’t been patched."
Chen Zhuo looked up at the clock on the wall.
"At a normal pace for pure mathematics research, it would take me at least a few months, maybe even half a year, to completely stitch together these boundary conditions and derive a perfect, logically self-consistent theorem."
The spark of excitement that had just ignited in the lab was somewhat dampened by Chen Zhuo’s calm words.
Lin Fang bit her lip.
"But we don’t have a few months. The supercomputer center’s time slot is allocated to us in nine days."
"Right. We’re out of time."
Chen Zhuo tossed the notebook onto the desk with a soft THUD.
"So, we can’t wait for the theory to be perfect before we start coding."
Chen Zhuo walked to the whiteboard, chalk in hand.
He looked at Zhang Yuan and Lin Fang, the gentle and calm demeanor he usually wore fading away, replaced by the focus and steeliness of someone facing a challenge.
"For the next nine days, I’ll be here."
Chen Zhuo pointed at the ground beneath his feet, then at the whiteboard behind him.
"I’ll be in charge of the derivations. I’ll calculate the algebraic and geometric boundary conditions step-by-step. If I hit a logical gap, I’ll patch it on the spot."
Then, Chen Zhuo stretched out his hand and pointed to the server keyboard in front of Zhang Yuan.
"You two, sit here."
"Every time I finish writing a line of mathematically sound logic on this whiteboard, I don’t want you to worry about whether it’s physically plausible or not. Immediately—and I mean immediately—translate it into low-level engineering code and type it into the server."
Chen Zhuo looked into Zhang Yuan’s eyes.
"I’ll write one line of theory, you’ll type one line of code. I’ll pave the road one meter at a time, and you’ll lay the code down one meter at a time."
Listening to Chen Zhuo’s plan, Zhang Yuan felt his scalp tingle.
’This is insane.’
’It completely violates the standard procedure for scientific research.’
No project had ever been done this way—starting the engineering code before the theory was even fully formed. It was like a construction crew following an architect who was still drawing the blueprints, building the tower as he drew.
This was a relay race with no turning back, relying entirely on intuition and perfect synergy.
But it was also the only way to make it to the supercomputer’s doorstep in time.
Zhang Yuan turned his head and exchanged a look with Lin Fang.
Without hesitation, Lin Fang pulled out her chair, sat down, placed her hands on the keyboard, and took a deep breath.
Zhang Yuan turned back. He walked to the desk, picked up the long-empty pack of cigarettes, crushed it in his hand, and tossed it into the trash.
He pulled over a swivel chair and sat down at the machine next to Lin Fang. He had already cleared the blue screen with white text, bringing up a brand-new code compiler window.
The cursor blinked against the black background.
He looked up at Chen Zhuo, who stood before the whiteboard.
"Let’s do this."
Zhang Yuan’s voice was no longer hoarse, but carried a ruthless determination, as if he’d burned his bridges behind him.
"You just focus on pushing forward. No matter how absurd the equations you write are, Lin Fang and I will hammer our keyboards to dust if we have to, but we’ll translate it into code that runs."
Chen Zhuo looked at the two of them.
He turned around, facing the massive whiteboard.
He raised his hand.
The white chalk met the surface of the board.
A crisp tapping sound echoed in the underground lab.
Chen Zhuo began to fill in the first missing homology group transformation condition from his hard-copied notes.
Zhang Yuan stared at the whiteboard.
Three seconds later.
The rapid clatter of a keyboard filled the lab. Zhang Yuan’s fingers flew across the keys, and the first line of low-level code, defining the polynomial coefficients, appeared on the screen.
The roar of the server fans continued unabated.
But this time, no one was staring at the frozen progress bar.
On one side, a frantic ascent of pure mathematics on the whiteboard. On the other, a real-time reconstruction of engineering code on the screen.
The nine-day countdown had begun.

Comments

Loading...