My IQ has been increasing year by year.

The lingering smell of 84 disinfectant in the corridor always makes it hard to breathe.

The door to dormitory 215 was ajar, with a crack left for ventilation.

Wang Dayong squatted down next to the socket by the door, his eyes fixed on the stainless steel electric kettle on the ground.

The rim of the cup was already blackened by smoke, and the water inside had just boiled, bubbling and churning, making the flimsy lid clang. He was clutching two packets of seasoning for pickled cabbage noodles in his hand, not yet tearing them open. Da Yong turned his head and glanced at Chen Zhuo sitting at the table.

Chen Zhuo sat at his desk, with his back to the sun.

A thick, large-format Russian book lay open on the table, its pages slightly yellowed.

The dormitory was quiet, save for the sound of an electric kettle boiling water and the occasional soft rustling of pages turning in Chen Zhuo's book. He didn't read quickly; although he had read Russian books before, he still encountered some difficult words. When he came across long sentences or obscure technical terms, his gaze would linger on them, his fingers habitually tapping lightly on the table. Then he would open the dictionary beside him, patiently tracing the root word in alphabetical order, mentally reviewing its precise meaning in the physics context. This Soviet-era edition of Landau's *Course in Theoretical Physics* was notoriously difficult to read in the physics community.

Not only because its theoretical threshold is high, but also because the author has a habit that drives all beginners crazy.

In the writings of this physics giant, the process of deriving formulas is often greatly simplified.

Often, the previous line is a complex calculus partial derivative equation, there's a blank line in the middle, and the next line simply says "Q, e. n AH" in Russian (obvious), followed by a clean conclusion. Chen Zhuo always felt a bit helpless when he saw these four words.

This expert is not only smart, but also really good at saving on typesetting costs.

Others might find it painful or skip over what is obvious, but Chen Zhuo doesn't.

Since the author skipped some steps, filling in those steps would be an excellent form of mental exercise for Chen Zhuo.

Chen Zhuo casually pulled a sheet of printing paper from the pile of clutter on the corner of the table.

This was a piece of code paper that Chu Ge had ruined a couple of days ago while testing his printer. The front was covered with densely packed C language functions, while the back was completely blank. He picked up the black fountain pen beside him, removed the cap, and began deriving the code on the blank side.

There was no pause, and no need to draft.

He peeled back the layers of those complex manifold boundary conditions, revealing algebraic matrices unfolding and interlocking on the paper in a remarkably symmetrical manner. It was like completing a rather interesting jigsaw puzzle.

After writing about half a page, and deriving the final step of a mapping, the resulting algebraic expression perfectly matched the conclusion in the book. Chen Zhuo put down his pen, looked at the equation on the paper, and felt a surge of accomplishment.

He capped the pen, set it aside, reached for the water glass next to him, and took a sip of water.

The water was a little cold, but he didn't care.

Just then, the door to dormitory 216 across the hall was suddenly pulled open.

Immediately afterwards, the sound of slippers stomping rapidly on the floor came from the corridor, heading straight for 215.

The door to room 215 was pushed open halfway.

Chu Ge walked in with his hair, which looked like a bird's nest.

He had dark circles under his eyes, a pale face, and a wrinkled T-shirt. He exuded a sense of dejection and anxiety, as if he had just come from an internet cafe after spending three days and three nights there. As the door was pushed open, the sounds from dormitory 216 came in clearly.

Those were two old, assembled computer towers, their case fans running at full capacity, emitting a deafening roar like a tractor going uphill. Amidst this roar, Lu Jia's sigh could also be heard from across the room.

"Brother Zhuo."

Chu Ge plopped down in the empty chair next to Chen Zhuo, leaned back, looked up at the ceiling, and let out a long sigh. Chen Zhuo put down his water glass and turned to look at him.

"Is it stuck?"

Chen Zhuo asked the question as if it were the most obvious thing, since Chu Ge usually came to see him about this.

Wang Dayong squatted by the sun, turned his head, and asked while holding up the unopened seasoning packet.

"Boss Chu, the water's almost boiled dry. Are we going to cook the noodles or not? I went to your dorm earlier, and Lu Jia didn't even say a word to me. I didn't dare ask him how many packets he was going to eat tonight." Chu Ge rubbed his face hard, his voice weak and listless.

"Dayong, unplug the power first. Don't burn it out." Chu Ge gave a wry smile. "Whether we can even have noodles tonight is still a question." Wang Dayong was stunned for a moment, then quickly reached out and unplugged the power cord from the wall.

The water in the electric kettle, having lost its heat source, gradually returned to calm, with only a wisp of white steam rising.

"What happened now?"

Chen Zhuo turned around to face Chu Ge. He casually closed the Landau on the table and pushed it aside to make room for conversation. Chu Ge pointed towards room 216 across the hall, his brows furrowed into a deep knot.

"It's stuck in an infinite loop, completely frozen."

Chu Ge sighed.

"That pharmaceutical wholesaler in the city, hasn't he been making a killing lately? Major hospitals, township health centers, and chain pharmacies are all asking him for 84 disinfectant, masks, and Banlangen granules every day. His old standalone Access inventory management system crashed, so he asked us to rewrite it using SQL Server."

Chu Ge became increasingly agitated as he spoke. He took out a cigarette from his pocket, intended to light it, glanced at Chen Zhuo, and then irritably put it back.

"It was originally just a simple database entry and exit mechanism; all you needed to do was write a front-end and connect a database. But the boss insisted on adding some insane allocation logic." Chu Ge gestured with his signature hand gesture.

"Supplies are in short supply. Orders from municipal hospitals must be given absolute priority, followed by chain pharmacies, and finally small clinics in county towns. Moreover, we can't cut off all supplies to small clinics; we have to reserve 10% of the inventory for them to share proportionally."

Chen Zhuo listened quietly without interrupting.

"When Lu Jia wrote the overall planning algorithm, he used nested loops."

Chu Ge rubbed his temples; he had a bit of a headache.

"If it's a hospital order, we follow Route A: check inventory and deduct the amount. If it's a pharmacy order, we follow Route B: check inventory and deduct the amount proportionally. Logically, there's nothing wrong with that." Chu Ge paused, his expression turning grim.

"But tonight, when we're delivering the project, Lu Jia and I put in 30,000 simulated data entries for stress testing. 30,000 orders with different priority tags are coming in at the same time, and the IF and Else conditional statements are nested five or six times. The server has to repeatedly traverse, compare, and sort these tens of thousands of orders."

"And then?" Chen Zhuo asked.

"Then the CPU usage spiked to 100%, the memory was full, the case fan was spinning so hard it was almost smoking, and the system crashed." Chu Ge leaned back in his chair.

"The algorithm's time complexity is too high. Lu Jia and I spent the whole afternoon adjusting the parameters on the other end, but no matter how we changed it, it just resulted in an infinite loop. The boss said we have to see it running tonight. If it can't handle 30,000 concurrent requests, we'll lose the remaining ten thousand yuan."

After Chu Ge finished speaking, he looked at Chen Zhuo expectantly.

"Brother Zhuo, you're quick-witted and have a strong foundation in mathematics. Could you help me figure out what's wrong with the underlying logic?"

Chen Zhuo sat in the chair, his gaze fixed on the book "Langdao" on the table, and pondered quietly for a few seconds.

He understood.

The problem Chu Ge and Lu Jia encountered was that they tried to navigate the maze using the most direct and cumbersome method of exhaustive search.

When the amount of data is small, the computer can handle the process of identifying each person, queuing them, and assigning them.

However, once the amount of data explodes exponentially, nested loops become a computational black hole.

This is logically isomorphic to the deadlock he encountered when reading the Princeton team's paper.

Derian's team attempted to cross the singularity using continuous spacetime calculus, but encountered divergence. Chu Ge and his team tried to handle the massive cross orders using linear conditional judgments, but encountered memory overflow. Chen Zhuo nodded.

"The line of thinking was off from the very beginning."

Chen Zhuo spoke calmly.

Chu Ge froze, his mouth half-open.

"Off track? Allocating based on conditions—isn't that the safest method of resource allocation taught in programming books?"

Chen Zhuo didn't rush to explain.

He reached out and took the draft paper that was covered with physics derivations.

He glanced at the densely packed formulas on the paper, the newly completed Landau theory. Chen Zhuo naturally flipped the paper over, revealing the side printed with obsolete C language code. The code on this paper had wide line spacing and many blank areas in between.

In the blank space, I lightly doodled a black dot with a pen.

"You're treating these orders like people queuing to buy tickets."

Chen Zhuo talked as he drew.

"The queue was too long, so you set up three different channels at the ticket gate. Every time someone came, you had to ask them: Where are you from? Then you decided which channel to let them go through. When there were too many people, the ticket gate was completely blocked." Chu Ge moved closer and stared at the black dot under Chen Zhuo's pen.

"How can we get them if we don't queue?" Chu Ge asked.

Next to that black dot, Chen Zhuo drew several more black dots that were far apart, and then connected them with straight lines.

"Treat them as individual state nodes."

Chen Zhuo slightly turned his wrist and drew a bipartite graph structure on the paper, instead of the tree-like branches that Chu Ge had described.

"Abandon the linear traversal approach. Abstract hospitals, pharmacies, and clinics directly into algebraic points with different weights, and abstract existing inventory into a set as well." Chen Zhuo quickly wrote down a few basic variables from discrete mathematics in the blank space on the paper, and then applied a very simple matrix mapping formula. "In this discrete matrix, there's no need to ask 'what ifs.' When an order comes in, it comes with its own weight value: 3 for hospitals, 2 for pharmacies, and 1 for clinics. Just perform a multiplicative mapping between the order matrix and the inventory matrix. The one with the higher weight will naturally be matched to the inventory node first."

Chen Zhuo added a stroke at the end of the formula.

"If the inventory node goes to zero, it becomes invalid in the matrix, and subsequent mappings are automatically skipped. All judgments are completed in a single matrix operation, instead of running tens of thousands of nested loops." After writing the last line, Chen Zhuo pushed the draft paper in front of Chu Ge.

Chu Ge stared down at the clear matrix structure on the paper, his brain rapidly translating the mathematical symbols into a database language he was familiar with. Although Chu Ge's mathematical foundation wasn't as strong as Chen Zhuo's, he had still managed to get into a place like the University of Science and Technology of China's gifted youth program, and his logical comprehension ability was barely top-notch. He looked at it for about half a minute.

"I..."

Chu Ge suddenly raised his head, the previous sense of dejection in his eyes vanished, replaced by a bright and enlightened light.

"Hash table mapping plus weighted sorting..." Chu Ge looked at Chen Zhuo.

"By converting all conditional judgments into key-value weights beforehand, and then directly performing set mapping, the server doesn't need to compare each item individually; it only performs a single overall algebraic operation!" "Hmm."

Chen Zhuo put down his pen.

"The computational load can be reduced by at least several orders of magnitude. Even if more simulation data comes in, it will only increase the dimension of the matrix a little, and the CPU will not be fully loaded." Chu Ge grabbed the draft paper on the table as if it were a life-saving check.

He didn't even look at what was written on the back of the paper before standing up.

"Dayong, keep the water warm, don't spill it!" Chu Ge shouted towards the corner, his voice cracking. "We're saved tonight!" With that, Chu Ge grabbed the double-sided draft paper and rushed out of dormitory 215 without looking back.

They rushed across the street, followed by the sound of the door to room 216 being kicked open.

"Lu Jia! Stop obsessing over that nested loop! Come take a look at this discrete matrix that Brother Zhuo drew! Reconstruct the logic!" Chu Ge's loud voice echoed in the dormitory across the way.

Dormitory 215 fell silent again.

Wang Dayong deftly plugged the electric kettle back into the wall socket. The water, which hadn't cooled down completely, soon started bubbling again, and the lid jingled once more. Chen Zhuo sat in his chair and gently rubbed the back of his neck.

I was reading for a long time with my head down, and my shoulders are a bit sore.

"Xiao Zhuo."

Dayong squatted on the ground, looked up at him, and smiled somewhat憨厚ly.

"You're really something. When Boss Chu came in, his face was ashen, but when he came out, his face was red."

Chen Zhuo smiled but did not reply.

He turned around, reopened the thick Russian book "Landau," and his gaze settled steadily back on the page where the bookmark had been. From dormitory 216 across the corridor, Lu Jia's somewhat subdued but rapid-fire voice drifted out.

Then came a series of even more intense and rapid keystrokes than before.

The keyboard clicked and pounded like a torrential downpour, the previous pauses and frustrations gone, replaced by a smooth, uninterrupted execution. Chen Zhuo ignored the commotion on the other end, not even glancing back.

He knew that once the underlying logical deadlock was resolved, the remaining code implementation work would be purely manual labor for Chugo, requiring no further attention from him. He lowered his head and continued reading the long theoretical exposition on thermodynamics in the Russian book.

When I encountered a slightly awkward sentence, I would open the Russian-Chinese dictionary again and quickly look it up alphabetically, immersing myself in Landau's world of thought. The sky outside the window gradually darkened.

In the evening of April in Huizhou, the newly sprouted leaves on the old trees sway gently in the evening breeze.

The loudspeakers on campus blared on time, broadcasting the clear, articulate voice of a news anchor, reporting the daily number of suspected and confirmed cases across the country, and reminding students to ventilate their homes and wash their hands frequently. During the school lockdown, each day was monotonous and somewhat depressing.

The gates were locked, and the cafeteria offered only a few dishes over and over again. Everyone was trapped in this campus of just a few square kilometers.

But the smell of cigarettes and typing in the dormitory diluted the dullness quite a bit.

The water in the electric kettle had boiled thoroughly. Da Yong tore open two packets of pickled cabbage noodles, broke the hard, dry noodles in half, and threw them into the boiling water. Chen Zhuo sniffed.

After studying theoretical physics all afternoon, my brain was working at lightning speed, but now, smelling the instant noodles, my stomach was honestly protesting with a rumbling. "Dayong."

Chen Zhuo's gaze was still on the pages of the book when he casually asked a question.

"How many packets of noodles should we cook tonight?"

Dayong took a pair of clean disposable chopsticks and stirred the instant noodles in the pot.

"I don't know, Boss Chu hasn't said anything yet."

Da Yong swallowed hard, staring at the noodles in the pot.

"But judging from the way things were going just now, this job should be done. If the final payment is settled, we won't be short of a pack or two, right? At worst, I'll just share my portion." Just as Dayong finished speaking.

A suppressed growl suddenly erupted from dormitory 216 across the hall.

"It's working!"

It was Lu Jia's voice. The usually taciturn Lu Jia's voice was extremely hoarse, carrying a sense of relief and liberation. Immediately following was Chu Ge's unrestrained laughter, a laugh that was almost manic.

"Hahaha! Thirty thousand concurrent data entries, and the server didn't even sound an alarm! Memory usage is stuck at 15%! The curve is as smooth as an electrocardiogram!" Chu Ge shouted over there.

"Lu Jia, save the recording! Send it to the boss's email immediately! This money's in the bag tonight!"

Hearing the commotion of revelry coming from the opposite corridor, Chen Zhuo's hand holding the pen froze in mid-air.

He smiled slightly, capped the pen, and closed the Russian edition of "Landau".

Another burst of slippery footsteps echoed down the corridor.

Chu Ge rushed into dormitory 215, the bruises on his face seemingly faded considerably, and he exuded the exhilaration of having just survived a grueling all-night project. He was still clutching the draft paper Chen Zhuo had given him earlier, covered in formulas on both sides.

"Brother Zhuo!"

Chu Ge braced his hands on Chen Zhuo's table, panting heavily.

"Brother Zhuo, you're awesome! Adding that discrete matrix made the system run smoother than Dove chocolate, and we saved the final payment!"

"It's good that it was saved."

Chen Zhuo nodded, his tone slightly relaxed.

For him, this was just a matter of course; if the mathematical logic was correct, the result would naturally be correct.

This is no different in essence from the process he just verified on the back of the paper by that expert.

Chu Ge turned to look at Da Yong, who was squatting by the sun, and then at the noodles that had been cooked until soft in the bubbling electric kettle.

"Dayong, how's the noodles coming along?"

Chu Ge waved his hand, his heroic spirit soaring to the heavens.

"We've got this all sorted out tonight. After the boss inspects it and pays the balance, I'll get you guys some nice treats at the school supermarket tomorrow—it's all on me! My treat!"