Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
After more than 30 hours of continuously working in a highly focused state, Lu Zhou was pushed to the limit.
When he went back to his temporary dorm, as usual, he did not change his clothes. The moment his head hit the pillow, he began to dream.
The sun was already up and about when he opened his eyes again.
Lu Zhou took out his phone and looked at the time. It was half past five in the afternoon.
“My sleeping schedule is reversed. It seems that I’ve got to try to fix it over the next two days.”
Since no one even interrupted him, he did not realize that he slept for so long..
There were dozens of missed calls on his phone screen. They were from Chen Yushan, his teammates, Professor Liu, the counselor, and his roommates.
Lu Zhou opened his WeChat and messaged all of them to explain why he did not pick up.
Once he finished sending the messages and put on his backpack, he was about to return the dorm key when his phone rang.
It was from Chen Yushan.
When he picked up the call, a sweet voice came through, “Lu Zhou! What do you feel like?”
Lu Zhou, “I feel okay.”
Chen Yushan immediately asked, “I heard the question was very difficult this year. Which question did you choose?”
Lu Zhou, “A, the one about the Chang’e 3.”
Chen Yushan heard Lu Zhou’s answer and opened her eyes in surprise as she asked, “You chose that one?! Did you understand the question?”
Lu Zhou thought for a bit and responded, “It’s okay. Although the proposition of a space question is scary, it wasn’t that difficult to convert it into a mathematical problem.”
“So, you don’t think that it’s hard,” sighed Chen Yushan. She said, “I have a roommate that also participated this year. She wanted to get the first prize and earn a chance to enter a master’s programme. But as soon as she saw the question, she was dumbfounded.”
The mathematical modeling competition can help towards entering a master’s programme!
Lu Zhou was amazed.
No wonder Lin Yuxiang was desperate for us to carry her.
I see. This makes sense.
Lu Zhou asked, “Which question did she choose?”
Chen Yushan, “Question B, the folding table one.”
How unfortunate.
Lu Zhou thought in his heart.
At least seven teams in the computer room chose question B. He did not know about the other three. It was likely that Lu Zhou was the only team in the entire computer room that chose question A.
“Then how did she feel about the question?”
“Very difficult. It involved structural mechanics and ergonomics. In short, very troublesome and cumbersome. She was complaining about this stupid table,” sighed Chen Yushan. She added, “The specialize group questions were normal. Design a pig farm and design a medicine storage cabinet. I won’t talk for long, go and eat. You probably just woke up. I’ll go and comfort my roommate.”
“Ok, see you later.”
Just as Lu Zhou hung up the call, he saw a message from Lin Yuxiang. It said that the md5 hash check and thesis upload was complete. She and Wang Xiaodong already went back to the school and that he should feel free to ask her for favors in the future. She also said she wanted to buy him food as a show of thanks.
Lu Zhou thought and replied, [You are welcome].
The competition was already over. Even though she dragged the team down, she could still be counted as a “support” and so, she was kind of useful.
There was no point complaining about her.
The school bus already left and the next one would be coming tomorrow morning.
The old campus dorms were pretty crappy. Lu Zhou did not shower or change for three days and he did not want to stay here for another second.
He put on his backpack and walked to the school gate where he ate some noodles outside the gate before taking the train back to the new campus.
…
“One two one, one two one…”
“Move your arms! Move your legs! Move, move, move!”
Shouting sounds came from the track field where a group of first-year students was being trained by instructors.
Lu Zhou saw the crowd of energetic young people and sighed. He missed being young. He then walked towards the dorms.
When he went back to his dorm and opened the door, the three animals surrounded him.
“Zhou, how was it?”
“Are you confident that you did well? Liu Rui said he screwed up again.”
“I really screwed up,” said Liu Rui. He smiled, “Why don’t you guys believe me? I saw the two questions and was stunned, I thought the second one looked slightly easier. My programming and modeling teammates had to carry me. I’ll be happy with a provincial award.”
Impatient, Shi Shang interrupted the guy, “Okay, okay, cool. If you didn’t screw up, I wouldn’t respect you. Move aside, I’m talking to Zhou.”
Huang Guangming came over and asked, “Zhou, how did you do? Is question A hard?”
Lu Zhou casually said, “It’s okay… Liu Rui, how about you?”
“Way too hard… A lot of the problems can’t be solved with mathematics,” said Liu Rui as he shook his head.
That was inevitable.
Whether it was mathematics or programming, they were only tools to solve problems. The core idea of the mathematical modeling competition was to reward those who were good at using mathematics to solve practical problems.
That was why the national prize is valuable.
It was different than a mathematical exam. A mathematical model did not have much content to talk about.
Lu Zhou’s two roommates had plans to enter the competition next year and so, they bombarded him with many questions. When he was finally able to get rid of the animals, he climbed up the ladder and opened his laptop in bed.
He was AFK for so long. If the progress bar did not move at all, he would be pissed.
However, when Lu Zhou opened the laptop cover and looked, he was furious.
F*ck you!
The progress bar had only moved a tiny tiny bit.
F*cking machine! Waste of electricity!
Lu Zhou was angry. He immediately closed his laptop, grabbed two programming textbooks, and went to the library.
…
After the mathematical modeling competition ended, Lu Zhou finally had some free time to relax.
He had two textbooks on him every day – [Data structure] and [Artificial intelligence programming paradigm]. He would pay attention to maths and physics classes and would do his own stuff during other classes.
That was the advantage of the university. He was the master of his own time.
Other than those deans or old professors, most professors only cared about lecturing. At most, they would do a name check of the people in the class but they would not care about what the students were doing in the class as long as they did not interrupt the lectures.
Lu Zhou would either be in class, studying in the library, or in his dorm playing with artificial intelligence Xiao Ai. By sheer accident, Lu Zhou discovered that talking with Xiao Ai improved the progress bar and it was much more efficient than being away from the computer.
Therefore, Lu Zhou wrote a small program in Python. He connected the interface between Xiao Ai and QQ. He then registered a QQ number in Xiao Ai’s name and named it “Eye”.
This way, he could use his phone to send messages to Xiao Ai. The Python program read his message and entered it into Xiao Ai’s dialog box.
This was equivalent to using a third-party chat tool to indirectly interact with Xiao Ai. Xiao Ai had absolute control of the mobile workstation and he could even remotely control his laptop.
He could ask Xiao Ai to execute a program and Xiao Ai would do it.
For example, if he told Xiao Ai to shut down, Xiao Ai would turn off his laptop.
Lu Zhou felt that was pretty cool.
Of course, for security reasons, he added a security lock to the Python program. Only the QQ messages sent by him would be read by Xiao Ai.
Therefore, if someone found Xiao Ai’s QQ account, they still could not do any damage.
After all, Xiao Ai could only identify Lu Zhuo’s account.