Chapter 145 Questions
Chapter 145 Questions
The sorcerer sat in the main seat, with his back to the window.
His brows were tightly furrowed, and he held a half-smoked cigarette between his fingers, the ash piled up long and teetering on the edge, but he was completely unaware of it.
Zhang Yuan stood next to the large blackboard at the front of the conference room.
He looked much more haggard than last week.
Her hair was a mess, like a bird's nest that hadn't been groomed for days. Dark circles under her eyes spread down her eye bags, and her white coat was wrinkled.
The other master's and doctoral students sitting on either side of the long table all had their heads drooping.
Some were twirling pens unconsciously in their hands, while others were staring blankly at the data report in front of them, which was full of blank tables.
A sense of utter desperation and complete collapse hung in the air, like a thick, water-soaked sponge, pressing tightly against everyone's face.
Chen Zhuo made no noise.
He walked around a few chairs and went to the secluded spot at the very end of the long table, where he sat down quietly.
He put his schoolbag on his lap and didn't take out any pens or paper.
Shortly after Chen Zhuo sat down, Zhang Yuan, who was standing in front of the blackboard, finally broke the suffocating silence.
"Fang Yuan, we really can't go on like this."
Zhang Yuan's voice sounded unusually dry, carrying a deep sense of powerlessness.
He turned around and pointed with the half-stamped piece of chalk in his hand at the long series of large partial differential equations on the blackboard.
That's an aerodynamic model depicting the violent compression of air as a high-speed train crashes into a tunnel.
"At the point in time when the train enters the tunnel, 0.01 seconds later, the slope of the pressure change is almost a vertical line."
Zhang Yuan looked at the sorcerer, his face filled with an unyielding bitterness.
"To ensure the absolute physical continuity of our fluid model, I have refined the spatial mesh to the extreme values that we can access over the past week."
Zhang Yuan threw away the chalk in his hand and patted the white dust off his hands.
"But this is where the microcomputer hardware reaches its limit. The variables explode exponentially. As soon as the simulation progress reaches this critical point of 0.01 seconds, the data stack in memory is instantly filled."
He took a deep breath, his voice tinged with despair.
"In order to break through this point this week, the main computer has already burned out two memory sticks. If it continues to run like this, the motherboard will also be scrapped."
Zhang Yuan's words struck everyone's hearts like a hammer blow.
A few suppressed sighs echoed in the conference room.
A short-haired female student sitting on the left looked up, her eyes filled with anxiety.
She was in charge of the flutter model of the car body side.
"Professor Fang, the first draft for our project's mid-term review is due by the end of next month."
The senior student flipped through the empty notebook in front of her.
"We can't get the micro-shock wave data from the front of the car, and the side force parameters are all a mess. We can't just submit some made-up data, can we?"
The senior student opposite him echoed him, his tone helpless.
"My wake vortex street effect has also completely stopped. The water flow at the source is blocked, and the downstream cannot perform calculations at all."
All eyes finally fell on the sorcerer.
Everyone knew perfectly well that Zhang Yuan wasn't slacking off, nor was he incompetent.
This is a dead end that is theoretically sound, but practically impossible to implement in the face of real-world hardware limitations.
The Taoist priest pressed the cigarette butt, which was almost burning his fingers, into the ashtray and crushed it out forcefully.
He looked up at the equations on the blackboard.
"I called the supercomputing center yesterday."
The sorcerer's voice was heavy.
"My schedule is already completely full this year. Even if I apply now, it will take three months for it to be approved. It's not a solution for my immediate needs."
The sorcerer looked at Zhang Yuan, attempting a final struggle.
"Zhang Yuan, could we make some compromises on the physical boundary conditions? Or, could we smooth out that extremely steep curve a bit mathematically, so the computer doesn't have to exhaustively search such an extreme grid?"
"No, Dean Fang."
Zhang Yuan shook his head, his tone very resolute, even carrying a kind of instinctive stubbornness.
"Micro-shocks are real physical phenomena. The process of air being compressed is absolutely continuous. If we try to flatten out this pressure peak or coarse the grid in order to accommodate the computing power of those few broken computers..."
Zhang Yuan pointed to the blackboard and said decisively.
"That would violate the most fundamental law of continuity in fluid mechanics. Once the model is discontinuous, it is no longer an objective physical reflection, and the data it produces would be completely wrong. If downstream users use this wildly wrong data to conduct stress tests, the high-speed rail they build will cause fatalities!"
Dead end.
A dead end, its exit sealed off by human lives.
The sorcerer fell silent.
The entire conference room fell into complete silence, with only the occasional distant sound of a bicycle bell coming from outside the window.
Chen Zhuo remained quietly seated at the very end of the long table.
In front of him was a paper cup that Zhang Yuan had casually poured out before the meeting; the warm water inside had already cooled down.
Unlike last week, he didn't take notes on the somewhat obscure fluid mechanics terms that people were using.
He simply stared at the series of continuous partial differential equations on the blackboard.
Combining the extensive cutting-edge literature that Su Wei had helped him retrieve over the past two weeks, and his own work in "Fundamentals of Aerodynamics"...
Having painstakingly grasped the theoretical framework, he had completely translated the physical dilemma into a mathematical deadlock in his mind.
My senior classmates are absolutely right.
The physical world is of course continuous, and air certainly doesn't break apart out of thin air. The equations Zhang Yuan wrote on the blackboard are textbook-level formulas.
But they tried to use microcomputers from the 1990s to handle the computational workload of a God-like perspective.
In order to draw an absolutely smooth pressure change curve mathematically, this poor machine was driven to its death.
The real world is rough, and engineering is even rougher.
Chen Zhuo lowered his head slightly.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the black ballpoint pen.
Remove the pen cap and gently slip it onto the end of the pen.
He opened the ordinary notebook in front of him and found a clean, blank draft paper.
Inside the conference room, people were still sighing and groaning about how to optimize the pitiful boundary conditions, while the sorcerer continued to smoke one cigarette after another.
No one noticed Chen Zhuo in the corner.
Chen Zhuo didn't speak; he was like a quiet watchmaker undisturbed by the outside world.
The pen tip landed on the paper without pausing for a moment.
An extremely rigid, even somewhat crude, discrete algebraic matrix slowly took shape under his pen.
Since pursuing physical continuity will burn out the machine, then let's not pursue continuity.
Slice that most fatal 0.01-second segment of time and forcibly smash it.
Instead of worrying about how the air inside was flowing, the system used matrix nodes to package it into a black, fault-tolerant box.
If computing power is insufficient, then reduce dimensionality.
The group meeting ended in a quiet and oppressive atmosphere.
There has been no substantial progress, and everyone's steps as they ventured out felt extremely heavy.
Back in the lab.
The somber atmosphere seemed to intensify.
Zhang Yuan walked to his main computer and pulled open the cover of the computer case under the table.
He sighed, reached inside, and skillfully pulled out a memory stick.
The edges of the memory stick were slightly blackened, and if you got close, you could smell a faint burnt smell from the circuit board.
Zhang Yuan picked up the broken memory stick and slammed it onto the table.
He slumped back in his chair, completely exhausted, and turned his head.
Chen Zhuogang, who was in the corner, had just returned to the lab with everyone and was taking out the few English documents he had brought with him and neatly stacking them on the corner of the table.
Looking at Chen Zhuo's young, gentle face, which seemed untouched by the harsh realities of scientific research, Zhang Yuan shook his head with a wry smile.
He felt that as the senior disciple, it was necessary to give this junior disciple who had just joined the sect a heads-up.
"Junior brother, were you frightened?"
Zhang Yuan pointed to the memory stick on the table, his tone revealing the helplessness and bitterness of someone who had been through it all.
"This is the reality of scientific research. There aren't many flashes of inspiration or world-changing moments. Nine out of ten days, the system crashes. You keep going down the wrong path until you're battered and bruised, only to find out it's a dead end."
Zhang Yuan let out a long sigh.
"Taking on a project this big is like a bottomless pit that can never be filled."
Chen Zhuo aligned the corners of the documents in his hand and placed them neatly.
Upon hearing Zhang Yuan's words, which were filled with a sense of tragic grandeur, Chen Zhuo stopped what he was doing.
He turned his head, his gaze falling on the blackened memory stick on Zhang Yuan's desk, then at Zhang Yuan's heavy dark circles under his eyes, and smiled gently.
"Senior brother, try to look on the bright side."
"At least it showed some mercy, only burning the memory modules. If it had burned through the motherboard as well, Dean Fang would probably smash the table during tomorrow's meeting."
Zhang Yuan, who had been filled with tragic emotions, was stunned for a moment upon hearing these words.
He opened his mouth, looking at Chen Zhuo's expressionless face, which even carried a hint of polite smile, and felt a lump in his throat, suddenly feeling both amused and exasperated.
Yes, if the motherboard really burns out, then there's nowhere to even cry.
"You little rascal..."
'
Zhang Yuan scratched his messy hair and let out a long breath.