"Chen Yue?"
Lin Feng asked tentatively.
"Are you afraid you can’t beat Yan University?"
Chen Yue shook his head.
"It’s not a problem."
Lin Feng found his behavior increasingly strange.
"Then what are you so nervous about?"
Chen Yue seemed to recall something.
He opened his mouth, but swallowed the words before they could escape.
He shook his head.
’What am I nervous about? I’m not nervous.’
’It’s just...’
’My high school roommate...’
’Is sitting on the judges’ panel this time.’
’While I’m sitting here in the contestants’ section.’
’No matter how I think about it...’
’It’s still a little embarrassing.’
Meanwhile, on the sofa for Yan University.
"Gu God."
"Why am I... a little nervous?"
Gu Ming turned his head stiffly and gave Wang Hao a smile.
"Me too."
It wasn’t that they were nervous about the strength of their opponents; they were very confident in themselves.
But!
Li Dong was one of the judges this time.
The two of them knew better than anyone how formidable Li Dong was.
Not in an academic sense.
But rather...
When Brother Dong explained problems, it was a true psychological assault.
Although today’s defense was different from explaining a problem.
Still, the two of them had a bad feeling about this.
At that moment, there were two soft knocks on the door of the lounge.
A staff member pushed the door open and walked in.
"Excuse me, please wait a moment."
"Could the team from Beihang University please come with me first?"
The three contestants from Beihang University glanced at each other, then stood up and walked toward the defense room.
The door closed with a CLICK.
About twenty minutes later, the door was pushed open.
The Beihang University team returned.
The other teams who hadn’t gone yet all looked at them, but they couldn’t read any particular expression on their faces.
Just then, the staff member came back in.
"Next group."
"Yanjing University."
Wang Hao took a deep breath.
He glanced at Gu Ming beside him.
Gu Ming nodded back at him.
The two of them, along with their ACM senior, followed the staff member into the defense room.
「Conference Hall No. 1.」
Five judges sat behind a long table.
From left to right were Min Ziqiang, Zhou Mingzhe, Zhang Wenping, Wen Jingxing, and...
Li Dong!
In the center of the room stood a projector screen on a whiteboard stand.
Across from the screen were three small microphones.
The staff member motioned for the three of them to stand in front of the microphones.
Li Dong looked up toward the entrance.
Of the three people walking in, he recognized two.
He let out an involuntary "Heh."
’It really is them.’
He glanced at the four judges beside him.
Before the other judges could speak, he raised his hand.
"Professors."
"I’ll be recusing myself from this group’s defense."
"They’re my roommates."
The judges in the room were stunned for a moment, then they all burst out laughing almost simultaneously.
Zhang Wenping waved his hand.
"Alright, alright."
"You just won’t speak for this group."
Wen Jingxing also said with a laugh.
"Old Zhang, you should just let him recuse himself entirely."
Min Ziqiang glanced at Li Dong, a meaningful smile on his face.
"I reckon he’d already guessed who wrote the two papers we have in our hands."
Li Dong laughed as well and nodded to the professors beside him.
Wang Hao stood in front of the microphone.
He was still running through the PowerPoint in his head.
When he suddenly heard the phrase "They’re my roommates."
He froze for half a second.
He instinctively glanced at the far right of the judges’ panel.
Li Dong was smiling right at him.
Goosebumps instantly broke out all over Wang Hao’s body.
But no matter what, the defense had to go on.
The final defense of the National Mathematical Contest in Modeling wasn’t like a defense for an undergraduate thesis.
This stage wasn’t about proving your methods were correct, much less arguing that your conclusions were tenable.
All of that had already been vetted during the preliminary regional evaluation and the national review stages.
At this stage, the five judges only needed to confirm one thing.
Was this paper, from start to finish, actually written line by line by the three of you?
So the format of the questions wasn’t complex.
Min Ziqiang, on the far left, was the first to speak.
"I’ll get us started then."
He flipped the paper from Wang Hao’s team to a specific page.
"In your paper, for the section on shadow occlusion, you didn’t use a traditional discrete grid."
"You used vector ray tracing."
"The shadow domain for each mirror was calculated entirely using analytical ray-polyhedron intersection."
"The pseudocode I have here looks very clean."
"I’d like to know, did you go straight for vector ray tracing from the beginning?"
"Or did you first try the discrete grid method, then fall back to vector ray tracing?"
The question sounded unremarkable.
But it was actually asking about the process, not the result.
Results can be fabricated, but the process cannot.
If the paper was indeed their own work, the process they described would be full of all sorts of little pitfalls.
A process with pitfalls is a genuine one.
Gu Ming took a step toward the microphone.
He wasn’t holding any notes.
He recounted the entire process from the very beginning, starting from when they first received the problem statement. He explained how they initially attempted a discrete grid approach, worked until dawn the next day, and then realized the grid’s precision was completely inadequate, which ultimately led them to switch back to vector ray tracing.
With each part of the explanation Gu Ming finished, Min Ziqiang made a small checkmark on the corresponding paragraph of the photocopied paper.
The second person to ask a question was Wen Jingxing.
He opened the paper from Gu Ming’s team in front of him.
"For me, the most impressive part of your paper wasn’t the vector ray tracing."
"Nor was it the hierarchical AABB acceleration structure."
"It was the final section: the robustness analysis under extreme, year-round sunlight conditions."
He looked up at Wang Hao.

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