Chapter 359 - 295: Major Issues of Mutual Concern

Chapter 359: Chapter 295: Major Issues of Mutual Concern

"Including the time-variant component, our input has a total of eleven dimensions."

...

"During your presentation, you just throw this diagram up and say, ’Our model is non-linearly sensitive to these three variables; the other eight dimensions were frozen after we ran an independence test.’ The judges won’t be able to look away."

"...So, do you two get it?"

The seminar room fell silent for about three seconds.

Wang Hao replied with his usual constipated expression.

"Got it."

Meanwhile, Gu Ming, who was sitting next to him, was in a daze.

He was way ahead of Wang Hao. Because he actually understood the meaning of every technical term Li Dong threw out, the shock hit him that much harder.

He looked at Li Dong with wide, clear eyes.

"Uh... buh..."

"Uh-buh-buh-buh."

Li Dong was in a fantastic mood. He clapped Gu Ming on the shoulder.

"Gu Ming, looks like you get it too. In that case..."

"...you guys wait. I’m going to go self-study for a few days."

The "buh" died in Gu Ming’s throat.

He instinctively looked up.

"S-Self-study? What are you going to self-study?"

Li Dong said with a serious expression.

"The national competition involves computers, too."

From pre-competition training to finalizing the paper, the national Mathematical Contest in Modeling was inseparable from tools like MATLAB, Python, LINGO, and SPSS, not to mention deep learning frameworks, parallel acceleration, and, more recently, emerging topics like differential privacy and federated learning.

When it came to math, Li Dong felt he could give the two of them three distinct paths to a solution with his eyes closed.

But as for the computer side of things...

He’d read a fair amount over the past year, but he wasn’t confident enough to actually teach it to someone.

Gu Ming jolted at the words.

"East God, East God."

"You must be really busy, right?"

"You don’t have to worry about us."

"We’ll work on our teamwork. You don’t need to bother with us, really."

Li Dong’s heart softened the moment he heard this.

’The bonds of friendship between classmates are truly precious.’

’See?’

’Gu Ming is so worried that I’m too busy, he won’t even let me tutor them.’

"Alright, then."

Li Dong patted Gu Ming’s shoulder and glanced over at Wang Hao.

"If you run into anything you don’t understand, just ask me."

"I’m available anytime."

Wang Hao and Gu Ming nodded frantically.

"Don’t worry, Brother Dong!"

"East God, you just focus on your own work!"

In high spirits, Li Dong turned and walked out of the seminar room.

He left the two of them behind, panting as if they had just escaped death.

...

Li Dong hadn’t taken two steps out of the seminar room when the phone in his pocket rang.

Li Dong pulled it out and looked at the screen.

Gao Wen.

"Teacher Gao!"

"Are you back?"

Li Dong had genuinely been looking forward to hearing from Gao Wen.

Gao Wen’s voice on the other end was a bit staticky, and a low engine hum was audible in the background.

"Ah, Li Dong."

"Sorry, I wanted to let you know something."

"The work I’m doing here won’t be wrapping up anytime soon. I probably won’t be back until after the semester starts."

’After the semester starts?’

’Doesn’t that mean I have to wait more than another month?’

But the man was an academician of the Academy of Engineering and was leading the Peng City Brain Project. He was the kind of person who could be summoned by his superiors at a moment’s notice.

Li Dong had no choice but to be understanding.

He quickly pushed down the sliver of disappointment he felt.

"Okay, Teacher Gao. Please, focus on your work."

"There’s no rush on my end."

To be honest, Li Dong’s study habit had always been to tackle things on his own first and only ask for help when he got stuck.

But this time, he was dead set on waiting for Gao Wen.

The reason was actually quite simple.

Mathematics is a self-contained discipline.

You can flip through a book and find definitions, lemmas, theorems, and corollaries all logically interlinked, following a single, coherent path from start to finish.

If you don’t understand something, you can look up the definition. If you don’t understand the definition, you can consult an earlier textbook.

Eventually, you can always trace everything back to a few fundamental axioms.

That is the most captivating thing about mathematics as a discipline.

The ceiling is high, but the floor is always solid beneath your feet.

But computer science was different.

Knowledge in the field of computer science became outdated far too quickly.

A new trick could be posted on arXiv today, someone would have a first-pass implementation on GitHub by tomorrow, a fine-tuned model would be up on Hugging Face the day after, and by the fourth day, some company would be filing a patent and stuffing it into their product.

The latest, most cutting-edge developments simply never had time to make it into any textbook.

This knowledge lived in forums, in GitHub issues, in voice chats within small groups of three hundred people...

And the people who had access to this information would almost never share it without reservation.

In that sense, the field was a bit like one of Huaxia’s traditional crafts.

It was all about apprenticeship; you had to be taught personally, step-by-step, by a master.

Hearing this, Gao Wen, on the other end of the line, actually sounded a little embarrassed.

"Alright, Li Dong, how about this."

"I know you want to make progress on your SNN research."

"I’ll give you a list of a few books."

"You can start with those."

"If you get stuck anywhere, send me a message on WeChat, and I’ll get back to you when I have a spare moment."

A warmth spread through Li Dong’s chest.

"Okay. Thank you, Teacher Gao."

The book list Gao Wen gave him over the phone covered the gamut from introductory SNN and brain-like computing to slightly more advanced topics.

It included titles like *Networks of Spiking Neurons* and *How to Build a Brain*...

Gao Wen added a few more words of advice before hanging up.

Li Dong let out a long sigh of relief.

「In the days that followed.」

Li Dong spent his days supervising his research group.

In his group, Professor Chen Zhaoming had also produced a rather interesting intermediate result along a minor path within the geometric Langlands program.

After listening to the report, Li Dong would only interject with a sentence or two at a few key junctures.

He knew very well that he couldn’t be too explicit with his own group.

If he spelled everything out, no one would be willing to wrestle with the problems on their own.

What he needed to do was point out a few spots, revealing just the half-hidden silhouette of the landscape behind the clouds.