Translator: Dreamscribe
Seo-ha decided to start entirely from the bottom without the help of any other programs.
‘It’s going to get incredibly heavy from now on, so I should start light.’
He created an empty project folder in VS Code and nad it ‘Synapse’. After opening the integrated terminal, he set up a virtual environnt and installed only the minimum necessary tools.
Inside the folder, there were four files.
The school as a physical space, and the agents as its mbers.
The engine that turns the ti of this world, and the matrix that will convert all events into nurical values and indicators.
Seo-ha made ‘ti and records’ the two axes that move the virtual world.
The school building was born as a square, and the students as single dots. But the inside was not as simple as the appearance.
Inside those, various human personalities and indicators were embedded.
Insider, outsider, explorer type, leader type, impatient type, countless patterns of human behavior were implanted into each dot.
The school was designed to function as a collection of resources.
Each resource had capacity, processing speed, preferences, usage ti, and priority rules.
Since resources cannot be distributed equally, conflicts inevitably arise, and humans are forced to make choices. And those accumulated choices would co together to form a society.
“Let’s start like this.”
Click.
As the engine was activated, the agents began to move as if they were alive.
The start of the Synapse engine was surprisingly simple.
***
Ti flew like an arrow, and the seasons changed twice.
“It’s already snowing,”
Large snowflakes were falling silently outside the music room window.
The school was busy with preparations for final exams.
Seo-ha ranked first in all subjects in the past two exams. But no one was surprised by it. Seo-ha had beco a student who was treated as an exception not only among the students but even by the teachers.
During the exam period,
Seo-ha continued to appear on the anonymous board as Duck Lord and solved difficult problems. In the rest of the ti, he read any paper he could find on the Riemann Hypothesis.
Updates to the Synapse engine also continued steadily, and by now, it was fairly accurately recreating the school environnt.
The matrix accumulated new data every day.
The queue in the cafeteria was now aligned closely with reality. During exam periods, the seat occupancy rate in the study room surged.
Students sotis clashed depending on their personality values, but at tis, they also showed concession and cooperation.
However, it was still difficult to call this the complete appearance of a society.
To run a simulation, data was necessary.
However, since Seo-ha could not obtain it, he had to input estimated values based on statistical data from literature or his own observations to set the paraters.
Even so, as ti passed, the world created by the Synapse engine began to resemble an actual school more and more.
The talent exchange with Gyeo-ul was still ongoing.
Seo-ha’s piano skills had improved rapidly, to the point that soone who didn’t know much about music could easily mistake him for a preparatory student.
Gyeo-ul also, through relentless effort, had co to follow high-level mathematics without much difficulty, so the exchange had been greatly beneficial to both of them.
“Right. Ti passed too quickly. What do you want to hear today?”
Gyeo-ul, who had matured noticeably, sat on the piano bench and looked at Seo-ha.
“Chopin Ballade No.1.”
The piano performance began to fill the room.
She now understood that her music held special aning for Seo-ha.
That was because Seo-ha had shown many unfavorable sides of himself while delving into the Riemann Hypothesis.
The Riemann Hypothesis connected not only number theory but also analysis, probability, and even physics, so understanding it required navigating countless theories all at once.
On top of that, the distinctive theories unique to each paper’s authors were added in, so the amount of information Seo-ha absorbed in a single day was as vast as what a university research team would handle over several months.
Now, in regard to the Riemann Hypothesis, Seo-ha had advanced to a point where no dostic comparison existed, and he had acquired the depth not to fall behind even in discussions with scholars overseas.
In Seo-ha’s mind, the endless waves of the Riemann zeta function continued. The irregular matrices of pri numbers surged like a vast ocean.
‘Ah… again!’
The more he dug into the Riemann Hypothesis, the more Seo-ha felt as if he were approaching an abyss.
Was the belief that he could solve it just a trap?
The closer he got in that direction, the denser the fog beca. Sotis, Seo-ha felt like he was drifting alone in a sea of formulas.
At such tis, Ducky would rise up and tell him to beco one with it. If he did, then he could read this vast ocean completely and approach the truth.
‘You’re already not much different from .’
‘Don’t you want to feel the waves of truth directly with your heart?’
Ducky’s voice was sweet.
But Seo-ha felt like he knew what lay at the end of that temptation.
‘I'll probably beco a madman.’
There was no way to digest all of that with a sane mind. So the only choice was to move forward one step at a ti, even if slowly.
The sound of piano ca through.
The of Duckie, played by Gyeo-ul,
She continued playing when she saw Seo-ha wasn’t doing well.
Seo-ha opened his eyes.
“How long was I like that?”
“About 40 minutes. It was a bit long today.”
Gyeo-ul looked at Seo-ha with her fingertips still resting on the keyboard.
Her expression held both worry and relief at the sa ti.
Seo-ha tried to smile, but his face didn’t quite form the expression properly.
“That... it’s really difficult, right?”
Gyeo-ul pointed with her eyes at the paper inside Seo-ha’s bag.
Seo-ha shook his head.
“Sorry. I made you worry. It’s not always like this, so I’m fine. When I’m with you, I feel at ease, and I end up letting my guard down without realizing it.”
After seeing him for several months, Gyeo-ul felt like she now understood Seo-ha.
A genius the world was watching, yet inside, a boy so precarious it wouldn’t be strange if he broke down at any mont. And also the fact that Seo-ha was inviting danger by approaching unsolved problems himself.
“I don’t get it! If it were , I wouldn’t even glance at that stuff.”
Gyeo-ul looked at Seo-ha with concern, then placed her hands back on the keys.
This ti, it was a softer lody. A warm arpeggio, like a spring breeze, filled the music room.
Seo-ha closed his eyes and listened closely to the sound.
‘I need to get a grip. If I keep this up, I might end up crazy like Gödel.’
But there had been results.
While reading the papers, there had been a mont that could beco a small breakthrough.
Gyeo-ul glanced sideways at Seo-ha.
His lips were slightly lifted, as if sothing good had happened. Gyeo-ul felt happy that her playing was helpful to Seo-ha, but also anxious at the sa ti.
‘Why can’t I just leave him alone?’
Even she didn’t understand it, but Gyeo-ul was deeply worried about Seo-ha.
“Thanks.”
Seo-ha murmured quietly.
Gyeo-ul didn’t respond and continued playing.
***
“Huh? It’s the sa person again?”
Seo-ha categorized the papers he had read using the sa thod he used during the Four Color Theorem.
Then he separated out the papers to be reviewed again, and among them, there was one repeatedly cited author.
In the analytic characteristics of the zeta function, in the probabilistic distribution of pri number gaps, even in the writings that connected to quantum chaos theory… the authors were all different, but they were citing the sa researcher’s papers.
The common point was that all of them were part of academia’s non-mainstream.
‘Who is this person?’
Mikhail Orsen.
A na likely of Slavic origin.
‘Departnt of Mathematics, Lesley University.’
“Lesley?”
It was a school he had never heard of.
But the email domain was from the U.S., and it pointed to Massachusetts, where both Harvard and MIT were located.
Seo-ha searched the internet and tracked down all of that author’s papers.
His na was in old journals. As if no one else was interested, his papers were buried deep in the search results.
“This is unpublished material?”
Such papers are usually those rejected by editorial boards or dismissed during peer review due to harsh criticism.
"My goodness!"
Seo-ha nearly scread while reading Orsen’s paper.
Because the direction he had been speculating about regarding the Riemann Hypothesis was incredibly similar to Orsen’s thinking.
However, he could also completely understand why Orsen was shunned by mainstream academia.
Poor logic and unorganized thoughts.
He was like a child running with a butterfly net, saying he saw a rainbow.
Seo-ha decided to send him an email for now.
Tap, tap.
[To Professor Orsen.]
-I’m a student studying mathematics in Korea.
While researching recent papers related to the Riemann Hypothesis, I happened to co across your work.
If possible, could we have a conversation?
– With respect,
Yu Seo-ha.
There are truths that cannot be known through papers alone.
Seo-ha wanted to verify the conjectures that might exist only in his mind.
‘Will he reply?’
Though called a professor, he was in fact a figure forgotten by the academic world.
For soone like that to receive an email from a young student overseas, it wouldn’t be strange for him to dismiss it as a prank.
Seo-ha tried not to expect too much.
He simply wanted to confirm whether the path he discovered truly existed, whether there was soone who had actually walked that trail before.
Two days later, at dawn, in his dorm room.
Beep-
A mail notification popped up on his laptop screen.
Seo-ha felt his heart sink. With trembling hands, he clicked the mouse.
[RE: To Professor Orsen.]
– So it was you, the boy who caused a stir by proving the Four Color Theorem.
I gave up on the Riemann Hypothesis long ago. If you saw sothing in my work, I advise you to pretend you didn’t.
That path is hell. My writings were repeatedly crushed during review, my research funding was cut, and even my colleagues turned their backs on .
That is not the path for a promising young man. I trust you understand.
P.S. If you're truly curious, co to my ho. I’m in no condition to travel far.
– Mikhail Orsen.
‘Co visit?’
His warning to pretend he hadn’t seen it was quickly forgotten from Seo-ha’s mind. The address Mikhail included was in Boston, near the university where he worked.
But when it ca ti to actually go, there were more than a few complications.
“Ah!”
Seo-ha jumped up and rummaged through the letter box.
From a pile of envelopes, he pulled out a bundle of invitations he had received so ti ago.
After gaining public attention with the Four Color Theorem, Seo-ha had received quite a few letters from the academic world and the dia.
Requests to appear on quiz variety shows, invitations to European academic forums, and even a request to attend a Math Olympiad symposium in Japan.
But Seo-ha hadn’t shown much interest in such things. A problem he had already solved was, to him, a thing of the past.
‘There was one from the U.S.…’
Seo-ha dug through the letters.
“Found it!”
[Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Departnt of Mathematics]
Inside the envelope was a phrase inviting him to the ‘Young Mathematicians Forum’, along with a notice stating that round-trip airfare and accommodation would be provided.
There was still ti according to the date.
Seo-ha brought up a map of the U.S. on his laptop and checked the address.
“It’s close.”
His heart was pounding.
‘But how do I convince Mom?’
Seo-ha looked at the envelope in his hand.
The gold-embossed MIT logo shimred faintly as it caught the light.
‘If it’s an invitation from MIT, maybe I can convince both the school and my parents without much trouble?’
It felt like holding an unbeatable card.
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