Yan University, Dorm 35, Room 404.
9:40 PM.
"Professor Xu Chen’s lecture from the School of Mathematics today totally blew my mind."
Even Wang Hao, a CMO gold medalist, hadn’t been able to fully follow it.
"He’s a Ramanujan Prize winner and a Changjiang Scholar, all right. He explained K-stability in birational geometry so clearly. And that derivation for Fano cluster polarization... how on earth did he come up with that?"
"Seriously impressive. Makes me feel like all that math competition stuff I did in high school was just playing in the mud."
Liu Qiang nodded in deep agreement, then glanced at the time.
"Huh? It’s almost ten. Why isn’t Li Dong back yet?"
Sitting on a stool by the lower bunk, Chen Nan joked, "You guys think... that kid didn’t run off to find a girlfriend the second he got to college, did he?"
Don’t assume that the academic superstars who get into Yan University Yuanpei College are all nerds who just lock themselves in their dorms to bury their noses in books.
After all, they were hot-blooded young men of eighteen or nineteen, just having escaped the ordeal of high school. Who among them didn’t yearn for a sweet romance?
Liu Qiang pushed up his glasses.
"I’ll admit, in the looks department, he might have a slight edge on me."
"But it’s only the first day of classes! He barely knows the campus layout. He couldn’t have hooked up with an upperclassman that fast, could he?"
Just as the three were deep in their gossip, the dorm room door was pushed open with a BANG.
Li Dong walked in, his face dark.
"Yo, Brother Dong’s back? What took you so long?" Wang Hao asked, noticing his expression.
"Did you... get shot down trying to hit on someone?"
Li Dong rolled his eyes. "Date, my ass. I just got kicked out of the computer lab."
’Late?’ Li Dong didn’t think it was late at all! In fact, he felt like time had flown by too quickly!
After getting some pointers from Academician Gao that morning about "memory chunking" and "cache hit alignment," Li Dong had been itching to optimize his algorithm.
But his own crappy Lenovo laptop wouldn’t even turn on anymore, so he had headed straight for the public computer lab at the School of Information Science.
Although the specs of the desktops in the public lab couldn’t match the GPU-accelerated small server cluster he had borrowed at Jiangcheng Sixth Middle School, they were at least much more powerful than his thin and light office laptop. They would have to do.
In the lab, he combined his new understanding of the algorithm with Riemann’s dimensionality reduction algorithm and rewrote the program for verifying non-trivial zeros in C++.
This time, he manually partitioned the massive FFT grid into tiny data blocks that could fit perfectly into the CPU’s L2 cache, completely solving the cache miss problem caused by bit-reversal permutation.
Just refactoring this low-level code took him several hours.
Unlike on the high-speed train, Li Dong didn’t start from the High Tier region this time.
To test his algorithm, he started from the beginning with a full verification, planning to root out every single non-trivial zero of the Zeta function on the critical line!
What Li Dong didn’t know was that even with the world’s most advanced algorithms, running on a server cluster at a Supercomputing Center, it would take several hours to reach the ten-billion level.
He took a deep breath and pressed the "Run" button.
The program ran as smooth as silk, with no memory leaks.
Ten-million level... Fifty-million level...
One-hundred-million level... One-billion level... Ten-billion level...
In just three short hours, this god-tier program, which integrated top-tier architecture with dimensionality-reduction mathematical thinking, had managed to precisely calculate every non-trivial zero on an ordinary computer in the lab. The count skyrocketed, breaking right through the ten-billion mark.
Li Dong was staring at the screen, deep in a state of "flow," contemplating the next step: multi-threaded concurrent optimization.
And then...
The computer lab administrator, an old man, mercilessly tapped him on the shoulder.
"Son, it’s 9:30. The lab’s closing. Time to shut down."
Only then did Li Dong snap back to reality.
’Are you kidding me...’
’Getting interrupted right when things are about to get good is a great way to cause... you know...’
’And this is the second time!!’
So, he was forced to terminate the process, copy the code to a USB drive, and head back to his dorm.
’I have to buy my own high-spec computer!’ Li Dong thought, grinding his teeth.
He had over 300,000 yuan in his bank account now; what couldn’t he buy?
As for Academician Gao’s suggestion to apply for a node at the university’s Supercomputing Center, the process was too cumbersome. Plus, there would probably be strict time limits, and he might even have to wait in line. He temporarily dismissed the idea.
Hearing Li Dong’s explanation, Wang Hao was stunned for a moment.
"What were you doing in the computer lab? Professor Wang from the School of Physics was giving an introduction to Quantum Field Theory this afternoon. You didn’t go?"
Liu Qiang and Chen Nan also looked at him, completely bewildered.
They had assumed that since Li Dong liked physics, he would have definitely gone to the School of Physics.
"Oh, I went over to the School of Information Science to hear Academician Gao Wen’s lecture on ’Low-level Algorithms and High-Performance Computing Architecture,’" Li Dong answered casually.
The three of them in the dorm room were instantly petrified.
"Huh?" Wang Hao said, astonished.
"At the start of the semester, didn’t you say you were going to choose physics when you declare your major in your sophomore year? Why did you run off to a lecture on low-level computer science?"
Li Dong put down his water glass and said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world,
"Because I glanced over the introduction to Quantum Field Theory during the summer break. I have a basic grasp of it. Computer science is more important right now."
His three roommates looked at each other, unable to tell if Li Dong was trolling them or being serious.
「The next morning.」
Li Dong got up early and went with his roommates to the science building for a mandatory introductory general education course for all freshmen.
The class was mainly taught by a senior professor from the college, who explained academic planning for the next four years of university.
"Students, welcome to Yan University," the old professor said from the podium, looking out at the crowd of former academic gods.
"You must understand that university and high school are fundamentally different."
"In high school, you absorb existing knowledge. But in university, especially here at Yan University, you are expected to create new knowledge!"
The old professor continued.
"I encourage all of you to join a lab as early as possible and engage with cutting-edge topics."
"The university is very supportive of undergraduates publishing academic papers."
"Of course, besides the fact that publishing in core journals like SCI and EI can earn you academic credits and points toward graduate school admission recommendations..."
The old professor smiled and threw out a more practical incentive.
"The university and its various departments have also established special research grants! As long as you can publish an article in a top international journal as the first author or corresponding author, the university will give you a substantial cash reward! For a paper in a Q1 top-tier journal, you could get tens of thousands, or even more... hehe, there’s no fixed upper limit..."
In the audience, Li Dong scoffed at the mention of something as vulgar as money.
Then he started counting on his fingers.
He might have over 300,000 yuan in his account, but who would complain about having too much money?
For the Qiu Prize, his physics paper based on "Hysteresis Loop and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking" was already written. If he published it after the prize was awarded, it would definitely be a high-quality SCI Q1 paper!
On the biology front, the gene-knockout experiment on that batch of Alpine Willow Chrysanthemum was still underway in Professor Zhang’s lab at Zhejiang University.
Once he got the verification data, perfectly resolving Mendel’s century-old regret, and submitted it to *Nature Plants* or another top-tier journal of that caliber...
Thinking of this, he suddenly realized that if the god-tier dimensionality-reduction verification algorithm for the "non-trivial zeros of the Riemann Zeta function" he was currently coding from scratch produced results...
’The ancestors were right after all, "Within books, one can find houses of gold"!’ Li Dong was blooming with joy internally.
But all of that was for later. Right now, he didn’t have a computer.

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