Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
To be honest, Lu Zhou was not psychologically prepared for this fame at all.
Overnight, his Weibo fans broke the 100,000 mark. The school leaders treated him well and even a secretary of the city came to shook his hand. Jin Ling TV station made an appointment to give him an interview and apparently, an international media was going to come…
The second night, Lu Zhou received a call from his father.
The father did not ask if his son ate or how his son was doing. Instead, he asked…
“Son, what is Zhou’s approximation?”
When Lu Zhou heard his father’s words, he nearly dropped his phone.
“Oh, dad, when did you start studying mathematics?”
“No, I’m not studying mathematics. A higher-up at the factory told me that you solved some Zhou’s guess and wanted to give you some award… I don’t understand.”
Lu Bangguo was very confused.
He normally did not read the news or go online and so, he was naturally ignorant of what was happening outside.
The proudest moment of his life was when his son got into a good university. The factory even gave him a 500 yuan red envelope.
Even then, the manager of the factory did not personally come and thank him. At most, the manager casually congratulated him. However, this time, it was not just some higher-up at the factory. It was the clerk himself!
For an ordinary worker in a state-owned factory, the clerk was considered a high ranking official.
Lu Zhou thought for a while and could not find a way to explain Zhou’s approximation, “Oh… Dad, how do I explain this to you? It’s basically a mathematics problem.” He added, “How about you go find an Everyone Daily newspaper from yesterday? There should be an explanation on it.”
“What… I go find what?! You’re in the newspaper?!” said Lu Bangguo with his eyes widened.
“Yeah, I’m going on TV in two days. But it’s the local TV station in the City of Jin Ling. You won’t be able to see it. Also, the school gave me a reward bonus. When the money comes, I’ll transfer some to your account.”
Lu Zhou remembered Dean Qin said that the news broadcast would be reported in the form of a newsletter, so his interview would be cut into 15-30 second segments.
“Transfer what money! You don’t have to worry about us, just take care of yourself! I’m not that old! Save your money, don’t spend it recklessly, and save it for a house!” said Lu Bangguo. When he heard that his son was going on television, he had a big smile on his face.
Even though he did not watch the news or read the newspaper, he knew that being on TV was not something a normal person could do.
Lu Zhou smiled and was about to say something when he heard shoe being kicked off and the sound of the door being opened coming through the telephone.
He instantly knew that it was Xiao Tong who came home.
Saturday was a half-day for school and since she did not have tutoring classes, this was the only time she could talk to Lu Zhou.
“Dad, give me the phone!”
He heard the rush of footsteps before the phone was robbed by Xiao Tong.
“Brother!”
“Xiao Tong, how are you?” asked Lu Zhou with a smile.
“Not bad, not bad! Brother, is the Lu Zhou from the University of Jin Ling really you?” asked Xiao Tong. Her voice was filled with excitement and worship.
“Who else could it be?” asked Lu Zhou impatiently.
Xiao Tong held the phone and said, “Brother, you’re my idol! Just a second ago, our maths teacher was bragging about you in class. He said you are his most talented student ever. He said he could see your talent from marking your papers!”
Lu Zhou thought for second before he smiled and said, “Old Ma?”
Xiao Tong said with excitement, “Yeah, him!”
Lu Zhou smiled and said, “Oh yeah, he was my teacher.”
Lu Zhuo did not remember Old Ma ever saying that kind of things to him. If Old Ma actually did, he must have been exaggerating. Lu Zhou was the type of average student in high school. Even though he entered some competitions, he had never actually won anything.
Between competition and exams, most of Lu Zhou’s energy was allocated to exams.
Xiao Tong’s eyes flashed with small stars as she said, “Brother, I admire you so much! Do I count as a big mathematician’s sister now?”
Ah, you’re over-complimenting me.
Although I admire myself as well.
Lu Zhou laughed and said, “Definitely. Therefore you have to study mathematics well. You can’t waste that genius brain of yours.”
“My mathematics is good, okay! Last month I got 120 marks in the exam!” screamed Xiao Tong.
“If you want to get into a good university, 120 is not enough! Try your best. I’m waiting for you at University of Jin Ling.”
Xiao Tong said confidently, “Yes! I’ll try my best!”
Lu Zhou hung up the phone and walked back into the dorm from the balcony.
Huang Guangming and Shi Shang were both rushing to do physics homework. Liu Rui had already finished the homework. He was holding a phone in one hand and a pen in another and was thinking hard as he stared at a piece of draft paper.
Lu Zhou placed the computer on the bed. He was about to climb into bed and teach Xiao Ai when Liu Rui suddenly threw his pen aside and scratched his head.
“Zhou, how come I can’t understand ur proof process?”
Liu Rui had already accepted that Lu Zhou had reached a level that he could never reach in his lifetime. However, in his mind, he was still a little reluctant to admit defeat.
We’re all from the same dorm. We had similar high school scores and mine was even higher. How come the differences become so big in a year?
He never read theses online, but this time, he read Lu Zhou’s thesis for days.
He did not want to understand it. Instead, he just wanted to know the difference between Lu Zhuo and him.
However…
The reality was soul crushing.
He could not understand the textbooks that Lu Zhou was reading and now, he could not even understand the stuff Lu Zhou was writing.
Lu Zhou laid in bed with his computer and casually said, “It’s normal. Number theory isn’t taught in undergraduate classes. Once you do a master’s in number theory, you would understand. If you’re interested, I suggest you start from [Abstract algebra]. You can learn about some Galois theory, which would be enough to support you in the algebraic number theory. If I remember correctly, you can take this class in your third year.”
Liu Rui: “…”
Liu Rui suddenly felt that it was a bad idea to start talking mathematics with this guy.
Huang Guangming and Shi Shang turned around and showed him a sympathetic look.
Lu Zhou did not care about what Liu Rui was thinking. He opened the computer and looked at his second QQ account’s chat history.
Not surprisingly, the group of mathematicians had sent 99+ messages.
Xian Wei: [Did you hear? A god in our mathematics department solved a world-class mathematics problem! Also, this god is in this group! ! !]
Dayday: [Friend, how is the view from up there? (cry)]
Kedu: [I heard about it ages ago.]
Chang Qing: [Idol!]
Dayday: [This god is so strong, how scary! He won the National Mathematical Modeling Competition recently, now he proved a world-class maths problem. All of the glory is being taken by him, leave some for the rest of us…]
Kedu: [The god never replies to us… (cry)]
Chu Chu: [Maybe the god is busy? (awkward)]
Dayday: [Maybe he’s observing us in the dark and thinks: Bunch of idiotic students! (cry)]
Lu Zhou: “…”
You guys just have to talk and increase my progress bar, why are you guys talking about me.
Lu Zhou silently closed the chat window.
The progress bar did not increase at a constant rate. Although the messages were at 99+ every day, sometimes the bar would get filled within a day, other times the bar would not move at all for days.
Lu Zhou estimated that this was “information entropy” at work.
Information theory was the father of information entropy. It was originally proposed by Claude E. Shannon in 1948 to find fundamental limits on signal processing and communication operations such as data compression. Through the concept of information entropy, the amount of information contained in a piece of information could be calculated.
Lu Zhou guessed that the mechanism of Xiao Ai’s upgrade was to analyze specific messages through an algorithm. It could learn human logic and thinking through the dialogue.
The more “useful” the piece of information was, the more it helped the upgrade. Useless chat messages such as spam or stickers would not help the accumulation of the progress bar. Instead, they slowed down the speed of processing messages.
Lu Zhou began to think.
“… If I place Xiao Ai on Tianhe No.1 and connect it directly to Penguin’s chat cache database, could it be fully upgraded?”
Of course, he was just guessing.
The upgrade conditions for higher levels probably changed. Even if he could fully upgrade Xiao Ai, he did not know if he could have this unknown technology on the Internet.
Also…
He felt that this system always f*cked him over and he was scared that his technology branch would screw him over some day.
“Who cares, I’ll see what happens. I’ll not think about things that are too far away,” said Lu Zhou as he shook his head and clicked on the progress bar to extract the experience.
[Technology branch (artificial intelligence) experience + 100]*3
[Information science experience +100]*3
Core science: Information science level 1(400/10000)
Technology branch: Artificial intelligence level 1 (400/1000)
He had taken another big step toward leveling up artificial intelligence.
However, he was a long way from leveling up information science.
When will I get 10,000 experience points…
