He paused and looked up at Li Dong.
"But for this segment, if you really manage to figure something out with the Li Criterion, then I’m afraid we’ll have to go back and review those previous few cases."
Li Dong nodded.
"Teacher Zheng, let me study it first before we say anything."
"Before we reach a conclusion, let’s just stick to the old rules."
Researcher Zheng nodded as well and said no more.
Li Dong took the exported data package and left the duty office.
He found a small, empty seminar room.
He copied the event package from the USB drive to his local machine.
Li Dong loaded the data package into the modified inversion framework he had built.
He sliced it by energy segments.
Starting from over ten TeV, he made a slice every small interval.
After slicing each segment, he forced the calculated cyclic weight derivative into the Li Criterion’s formula to see where the final coefficient would land.
The first segment.
The coefficient scraped past the upper edge of the anchor interval.
It was neither inside nor outside.
Li Dong furrowed his brow.
The second segment.
The coefficient grazed the edge once again.
This time, it dipped slightly into the anchor interval before being pulled back out.
The third segment.
The coefficient simply hopped on the boundary of the anchor interval—once, twice—before finally landing outside it.
Li Dong ran every segment.
The curve on the screen, formed by the criterion coefficients, looked very strange.
It wasn’t a curve that lay obediently within the anchor interval, which would have meant it was a pure Illusion Peak.
Nor was it a curve that stayed cleanly outside the anchor interval, which would have indicated a clean, true signal.
It just kept scraping along the edge of the anchor interval, hopping its way forward.
Li Dong stared at the curve for a long time.
The Li Criterion, this "ruler," had a temper of its own.
Once this ruler was applied, it usually gave a decisive, clear-cut answer.
Either true or false.
But this time...
Faced with this segment of data, the ruler had actually given an ambiguous response.
This was the first time Li Dong had seen anything like this from the Li Criterion since he created it.
He sat in his chair in silence for a long while.
’This event package isn’t so simple.’
He made this judgment in his heart, relying almost entirely on instinct.
’As for *how* it isn’t simple...’
He couldn’t say for the time being.
Just as he was still staring blankly at the screen, the seminar room door was pushed open gently.
Zhang Wenping poked his head in.
"Li Dong, how’s the run going?"
Li Dong snapped back to his senses.
He suppressed the bad feeling in his gut and smiled at Zhang Wenping.
"Teacher Zhang."
"I ran it once. The result is a bit ambiguous."
"I want to take a closer look."
Zhang Wenping nodded and didn’t press him for details.
He walked in, closing the seminar room door behind him.
"Set it aside for now."
"We have to go grade papers this afternoon."
"Old Min, Old Zhou, and Old Wen will be here soon."
Only then did Li Dong remember.
Today was the first day the national review committee for the national competition was gathering in Jinling to grade papers.
He quickly closed the data package and followed Zhang Wenping out the door.
The review committee’s work was set up in an evaluation room in the Wenke Building on Jinling University’s Gulou Campus.
There were only five desks in the room, and on each desk sat a stack of printed papers.
All information on these papers related to team identity had been completely removed.
Each paper only had a temporary ID number generated by the system.
Furthermore, the papers assigned to each reviewer had been prescreened by the organizing committee using technical means.
This ensured that no reviewer would receive a paper from their own university.
When Li Dong walked into the evaluation room, Min Ziqiang, Zhou Mingzhe, and Wen Jingxing were already there.
The men nodded at him.
Min Ziqiang smiled.
"Li Dong, I reckon that stack of papers on your desk will keep you busy for a while."
Li Dong took the opportunity to sit down at his assigned seat.
He glanced at the stack of papers on his desk. There were about seventeen or eighteen of them—quite a lot, indeed.
At that moment, Zhang Wenping nodded to the group.
"We’re all familiar with the rules, so I’ll keep it brief."
"No talking during the grading process."
"After everyone’s done with their first pass, we’ll sit down and confer."
The reviewers all nodded.
Soon, the only sound in the room was the rustling of turning pages.
The stack on Li Dong’s desk was almost entirely composed of entries for Problem A.
[Optimal Design of a Fixed Sun Mirror Field].
The problem was set against the backdrop of a solar tower power station in China.
On a sizable plot of barren land stood a heat-absorbing tower dozens of stories high.
Surrounding the tower were thousands of enormous mirrors that could turn slowly to follow the sun.
Each mirror was called a "Sun-Fixing Mirror."
Their job was simple.
They had to reflect beams of sunlight, one by one, onto the heat absorber at the top of the tower.
When the top of the tower received these thousands of light columns, its temperature would instantly soar to several hundred degrees.
The working fluid flowing inside would be heated, then channeled down to drive a steam turbine and generate electricity.
This entire system was called tower-based solar thermal power generation.
To ensure the electricity generated by the power plant over the entire year could be sold at the best price, the key lay in how those thousands of mirrors were arranged.
Which ones were closer to the tower, and on which side they stood.
Which ones would have a portion of their sunlight blocked by the mirrors in front, and which ones would be tilted an extra degree or two when reflecting.
All of this had to be calculated clearly and then integrated into a single layout diagram.

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