From child prodigy to chief scientist

Chapter 108 has finally gone from 0 to 1.

[Entry Name: Inspiration]

[Entry Task: Collect 1000 inspiration fragments]

[Effect of this term: When you think about a core issue for a long time, your subconscious is more likely to generate related sparks of inspiration.]

[Within a short period of time when inspiration strikes, associative abilities and memory retrieval speed are significantly enhanced.]

"The effect of this entry, although not as exaggerated, still looks pretty good."

Based on the system's description of the effect of this term, when dealing with various difficult problems in the future, it should be easier for various possible solutions to flash through my mind.

In addition, the enhanced effect after the "Spark of Inspiration" appears is equivalent to being in a buff state for a short period of time.

From the perspective of the task itself, this task should be able to be completed within a limited time.

Although Xu Xiao doesn't yet know exactly what constitutes a "fragment of inspiration," it doesn't seem to be that strict.

As long as you find the right method and persevere, you will be able to complete the task sooner or later.

"Since this entry is acceptable, then I won't create a third one."

In fact, Xu Xiao still wanted to create another entry to compare and then make a choice.

However, given the system's rules this time, if a third term is created, the previous term tasks will also disappear, and it will be impossible to go back and make a selection.

Xu Xiao wasn't entirely confident that she could create a more suitable entry next time.

Rather than taking risks, it's better to take profits now.

"System, I choose to accept the Inspiration Keyword task!"

The "Inspiration" keyword task has been activated.

[Entry Task Progress: 0/1000]

Seeing that the new terminology task had begun, Xu Xiao stopped worrying and went to the computer lab as planned to look up papers and start studying.

At first, he didn't deliberately pursue completing the task, but instead tried to build up a few fragments of inspiration along the way and summarize the patterns from them.

However, after two hours, Xu Xiao was somewhat disappointed to find that the system entry progress had not changed at all and was still an embarrassing zero.

"That shouldn't be the case—I feel like I did have some inspiration just now."

While reading the paper, Xu Xiao naturally developed her own thoughts, going beyond simply trying to understand it.

However, this was not recognized as a "fragment of inspiration" by the system, indicating that the requirements of this task were not as simple as Xu Xiao had imagined.

Seeing that it was getting late, Xu Xiao had no choice but to shut down her computer and prepare to go to the cafeteria for dinner so as not to miss her evening class.

After the evening class began, Fei Ran first talked about the three questions from the afternoon's practical simulation.

Overall, everyone's scores in this test were somewhat lower than before.

Of course, this is not due to the difficulty of the test questions, but mainly because the format of the English test paper greatly increases the difficulty for them to understand the test questions.

This time, Ge Xijie also failed to get a perfect score, which was unusual. He misunderstood the conditions of one of the questions, which led to the loss of points.

He knew this wasn't a problem with his math skills, so he continued to cram for English, hoping not to lose points on the next test because of this issue.

Pan Hong still got a perfect score, but because of the English test, she spent more time understanding the questions than before.

She thought that next time, she should be able to try answering in English, even if she might lose some points because of it, it wouldn't matter.

Xu Xiao, on the other hand, had no interest in listening to the lecture at all. He had already answered the test paper with a perfect score in English, so there was really no point in listening to the lecture.

At this moment, what he cared about more was how to complete the task of accumulating fragments of inspiration.

Logically speaking, as long as one's thinking is in a divergent state and some new ideas are generated, they should be defined as fragments of inspiration.

However, this attempt did not actually work, and to this day, the progress of this entry has not made any progress.

After thinking for a while, Xu Xiao still couldn't find any clues.

"Sigh—this system doesn't even bother to explain itself properly."

Left with no other choice, Xu Xiao could only raise her head and listen to the lecture to pass the time.

At this moment, Fei Ran is explaining an algebraic inequality problem that was on today's exam.

Following the conventional approach, this problem can be derived using Cauchy's inequality and rearrangement inequality, and then proven by combining the tangent method with bounding.

Xu Xiao did the same thing back then, but now Xu Xiao has thought about it again and feels that the same idea of ​​studying the lower bound of integrals can be used to complete the proof.

Since there was nothing else to do, Xu Xiao decided to start deriving the new idea.

"Consider each term as a function f() = /(1—), then estimate it using the integral of a convex function, and further scale it using Jensen's inequality. That should solve the problem."

This approach has its unique advantages; it eliminates the need to adjust Cauchy's coefficients and even skips the transformation process.

This is simply because it contains some advanced methods that are definitely not usable in IM0.

However, Xu Xiao is just killing time now, so it doesn't matter whether the method is beyond the scope of the curriculum or not.

After some deduction, Xu Xiao successfully completed the proof.

Xu Xiao's approach of scaling down the scope of problems is at the level of scientific research. Using it for a high school competition-level problem does seem like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

At that moment, Xu Xiao noticed that the interface of the system entry task had quietly changed.

"Entry progress—it's already gone from 0 to 1?"

This change caught Xu Xiao somewhat off guard, since he hadn't done anything else besides working on a problem.

"Does that mean that solving competition problems can be considered accumulating fragments of inspiration?"

Xu Xiao felt that the truth of the matter was probably not like that, but since such a change had just occurred, Xu Xiao decided to try it again in the same way and see how the task system interface would react.

In the time that followed, Xu Xiao randomly picked a problem he hadn't done before and patiently started working on it.

After finishing the questions, Xu Xiao looked at the system interface expectantly, but was somewhat disappointed to find that the task progress had not changed at all and was still stuck at 1/1000.

"Hmm—this time it won't work."

'

Just as Xu Xiao guessed, the key to the matter is not the problem itself, but some other factors involved.