Chapter 238 - 146: Run it on the Machine

Chapter 238: Chapter 146: Run it on the Machine

The conference room was unnervingly quiet.

Outside, the sky was overcast. Rain clouds hung low. Even the cicadas in the trees had stopped their chirping. The muggy air in the room seemed to have frozen solid.

Zhang Yuan’s bloodshot eyes held a dazed look.

He lowered his head, his gaze falling on the sheet of scratch paper that had been pushed in front of him.

His mind was currently consumed by despair-inducing partial differential equations, grids, boundaries, and time steps.

So when his eyes met the neatly arranged symbols on the paper, his first reaction was confusion.

There were none of the curl symbols common in fluid dynamics, nor any divergence formulas.

All he saw were neat, square brackets filled with numbers and algebraic terms.

Zhang Yuan frowned and subconsciously picked up the paper.

He understood the first line. It was a transformation formula for dimensionality reduction.

As he read on, his brow furrowed tighter. The unfocused look in his eyes, born of exhaustion, was gradually replaced by a sense of absurdity and disbelief.

"Xiaozhuo."

Zhang Yuan’s voice was extremely hoarse. When he spoke, it was like sandpaper grating in his throat.

"What is this?"

He held up the paper and shook it in mid-air, the sheet making a RUSTLING sound.

"Matrices?"

Zhang Yuan looked at Chen Zhuo, who was seated at the far end of the long table, his tone tinged with an instinctive rejection.

"You’re using algebraic matrices to calculate fluid dynamics?"

Chen Zhuo sat in his chair, his hands resting naturally on the tabletop.

"Mhm."

Chen Zhuo nodded.

"Discrete algebraic matrices."

"What about the time variable?"

Zhang Yuan’s voice unconsciously rose a notch. He pointed to a large blank space in the middle of the page.

"Did you just erase the time derivative? Where did the 0.01-second physical process go?"

Zhang Yuan turned and pointed to the mess of hastily altered formulas on the blackboard behind him.

"Fluid is a continuous medium. When the front of a train enters a tunnel, the air is violently compressed. This is a continuous physical process. Our Navier-Stokes equations, conservation of mass, conservation of momentum—they’re all built on the foundation of temporal continuity."

Zhang Yuan turned back to stare at Chen Zhuo, his voice trembling with agitation.

"And now you come up with a matrix that maps state A directly to state B, completely ignoring the process in between? That’s physically impossible! You can’t just throw a cloth over the equation because it’s hard to solve and pretend it doesn’t exist."

This was the firm conviction of a fluid dynamics Ph.D.

Zhang Yuan wasn’t targeting Chen Zhuo. He was simply defending the common sense of physics that had been drilled into him for over a decade, something that was now part of his very being.

Faced with Zhang Yuan’s agitation, Chen Zhuo didn’t argue back.

He just listened quietly, looking at Zhang Yuan’s bloodshot eyes, then leaned back slightly.

"Senior."

Chen Zhuo’s voice remained calm.

"Of course physical continuity exists. The air doesn’t just vanish into thin air."

He paused for a moment.

"But a computer doesn’t recognize that principle. It only recognizes memory."

Chen Zhuo looked Zhang Yuan in the eye.

"To simulate the continuous process you’re talking about, you’ve divided time into millionths of a second. Within that 0.01-second span, the variables explode exponentially. The computer doesn’t care about your physical common sense. It’ll just cut the power the moment the memory sticks are full."

Zhang Yuan opened his mouth to speak, but found that no words would come out.

Those memory sticks with the blackened edges were the most damning evidence in the lab.

"Since it can’t compute it,"

Chen Zhuo gestured to the paper.

"why should we force it to?"

"But..."

Zhang Yuan’s fingers tightened on the paper.

"If you skip the micro-process, the macro-data becomes rootless. It just doesn’t make any sense."

Just as Zhang Yuan stubbornly prepared to argue further, a hand reached out from the side and took the scratch paper from his grasp.

"Let me see that."

The Alchemist’s voice sounded from the head of the long table.

Zhang Yuan froze for a second, swallowed the rest of his words, and stepped aside.

The Alchemist laid the paper flat on the table in front of him.

He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a somewhat worn-out glasses case, opened it, and put on a pair of reading glasses.

The conference room once again fell into a dead silence.

Lin Fang stopped wiping her tears. The boy with the glasses stopped chewing his pen. Everyone held their breath, their eyes fixed on the Alchemist sitting in the main seat.

The Alchemist read very slowly.

His index finger traced the paper, following the lines of text written by Chen Zhuo, moving down inch by inch.

The ceiling fan overhead turned with a steady CREAK.

A minute passed.

Two minutes passed.

The cigarette between the Alchemist’s fingers had already burned down to the filter, the ash falling onto the tabletop unnoticed.

At first, his brow was furrowed tightly, just like Zhang Yuan’s had been.

But as his finger moved down the page, his brow gradually relaxed. His gaze lingered for a long time on several key transformation formulas.

The old fox’s academic intuition was exceedingly sharp.

He understood Chen Zhuo’s intention.

’This isn’t fluid dynamics at all. This is a pure, whatever-it-takes mathematical tool.’

The Alchemist’s finger stopped near the bottom of the page.

He looked up, took off his reading glasses, and placed them on the table.

The Alchemist looked at Chen Zhuo at the far end of the table. There was no anger in his eyes, nor any mockery, but rather an extremely complex scrutiny.

"Xiaozhuo."

The Alchemist spoke, his voice deep and steady.

"Using a Discrete Matrix for dimensionality reduction, bypassing the exhaustive dead-end in calculus, treating that 0.01-second continuous fluid motion as a black box, and calculating only the initial conditions going in and the final results coming out."