Translator: Dreamscribe
Entropy was shocked.
He was taller than expected, so she didn’t even consider that he might be Seo-ha.
“Yu Seo-ha?”
“The Four Color Theorem one?”
The two widened their eyes.
Entropy nodded.
“No doubt about it. The problems we gave aren’t that flimsy. He solved this without even a hint?
Unless you're a genius of that caliber, it’s impossible.”
Only then did the two understand the situation and broke into wide grins.
“So it was true he was coming to MIT.”
“I didn’t even know he was coming to our school,”
A big catch they hadn’t even hoped for had walked in on its own.
Entropy approached the screen and closely examined the equation Seo-ha had written.
They had planned to accept any result that was roughly correct as an answer. So they had left room for calculation errors or phase mismatches.
But the result Seo-ha presented was different.
He hadn’t just written an approximately correct value, but a function that perfectly converged with the data.
"This is just monstrous? It's too accurate to call it intuition."
Considering the ti he cleared it, it ant he skipped the delay term in one go. And once he recognized the phase shift, he didn’t just analyze in the frequency domain but reconstructed the phase space itself.
“Is that really that impressive?”
Root, who didn’t major in mathematics, didn’t fully understand what had surprised Entropy.
“To align the delay term without compensation, at the very least, you have to catch a phase discontinuity once in the complex frequency domain.
Normally, if the phase is distorted in FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), you need an unwrapping process, right? But he didn’t use that. He restored it directly from the raw phase state.”
Cypher Fox glanced sideways and asked.
“Say directly, how?”
“I’m not sure, but probably by reverse-tracing the phase shift of the eigenmode function.
Even without knowing the exact form of the function, if you just look at the energy density and the flow of the argunt, you can roughly ‘visualize’ the phase rotation. It’s hard to believe he did that by hand, though.”
He frowned as if trying to understand what Entropy was saying.
“So, to sum it up, what we were doing with complex signal filtering and Fourier transforms, he did it all in real ti in his head.”
“Which ans we’ve found an incredible mathematician, right? Now we just have to scout him properly.”
Root smacked his lips and stood up.
‘No, you guys haven’t fully grasped what I an. This is…’
This was a way of thinking only possible for soone who could perceive functions not as symbols but as a three-dinsional space right in front of them.
“Alright, let’s go et this badass mathematician!”
“Yeah yeah! We can’t keep such an honored guest waiting too long.”
Root pulled out the graphics card he had bought as the first prize. He didn’t forget the souvenirs for 002 and 003, who made it to the finals.
The three of them stepped into the hallway.
The stage for the final round was in the lecture room right next door, and they opened the door with excitent in their hearts.
‘Hmm?’
002 was wildly hitting Seo-ha with a beaver plushie. 003 was choking him from behind.
“How the hell did you do it?”
“Explain it to us too!”
“I told you. I just saw it.”
“You deceiver!”
“So how exactly do you ‘just see’ it?! I should’ve gone to Duke. I ca to MIT and ran into a lunatic like you.”
Backpack guy grabbed Seo-ha by the collar and shook him. Seo-ha, at a loss, raised a gesture of surrender.
“Ahem!”
“Guys, let’s keep it moderate.”
“Ah! The hackers!”
“Sunbaes, is it really okay for you to show yourselves like this?”
“You must not know because you’re freshn, but at MIT, hacking is actually encouraged. As long as you follow the rules, that is.”
“Rules?”
“Yeah. Don’t cause harm to others, clean up after yourself, and most importantly, don’t get caught.”
“Oh! That sounds kinda cool.”
“Right? Pretty chill.”
“Alright! 002 and 003, take these and head ho. You can be proud! You did great just making it this far.”
Entropy handed Ellie and Backpack guy coffee mugs made from beakers.
Instead of asurent lines, the outside showed stress level percentages.
The two accepted the cups and made sulky expressions.
“My stress level’s going up. I guess I really do need this right now.”
“What’s with the handle? How’d they even make this?”
Ellie tilted the cup this way and that, examining it as if appraising a gemstone.
“This is a total must-have item, you know? It's a limited edition we made ourselves, so take good care of it.”
Root guided the two out of the lecture room.
“What about ?”
Seo-ha stood blankly, staring at the hackers.
“We prepared sothing special just for the first place winner.”
Root brought over a beaver plushie.
“This isn’t an ordinary plushie. It’s packed with various features. You can even control it with your phone.”
Beep-
When he pressed a button, the beaver moved its tail.
“You saw it earlier, right? You can make it talk with a program, and it has a gyro sensor, so it reacts to human movent. Of course, you can reprogram it too.”
Root handed him the plushie.
“Wow! It’s cute.”
Seo-ha took the plushie and examined it.
Every ti it wagged its tail, a small servo motor vibrated with a soft whirr.
“Now for the real reason we’re here...”
“Yes?”
‘Wasn’t everything over already?’
Seo-ha, excited about going ho and programming the beaver, opened his eyes wide.
“Where should I begin? We were originally a club that did hacking for fun. We even have code nas.... I’m Entropy.”
“I’m Root.”
“Cypher Fox.”
Entropy laughed loudly at Seo-ha’s puzzled expression.
“Hope you understand. We’re more used to being called by our code nas.”
"I see, that's interesting."
“There are quite a few teams like us at MIT.
When people hear ‘hacking team’, they usually think of illegal stuff, but it’s different here. Hacking is part of MIT’s identity.”
“Identity?”
“Yeah.”
Root picked up from Seo-ha’s question.
“Hack to learn, learn to hack. This school believes the hacking process itself is learning. So we’re hackers, but we never hurt anyone.”
Cypher Fox folded a finger as he continued.
“There are officially eighteen registered hacking teams at MIT. Each team has different interests, security research, robotics, cryptography, art, social engineering.”
It was an intriguing story.
“What about you guys?”
The three looked at each other and smirked.
“We’re interested in ga developnt.”
“Ah!”
Now it made sense.
Today’s orientation was no different from a ga.
Cypher Fox opened a laptop and showed it to Seo-ha.
“Watch closely.”
Tap, tap.
Graphics were displayed on the screen.
The Charles River, Killian Court, the Infinite Corridor, all rendered in intricate detail.
Every structure of MIT was modeled in 3D with remarkable precision.
“The player is a freshman, and the NPCs include professors, researchers, TAs, and staff. We titled it ‘Surviving MIT’.”
‘Is this a zombie apocalypse ga or sothing?’
It was a strange title.
“What kind of ga is it?”
“You can study, start a business, even date, whatever you want. Since it's based on real locations, no violence is allowed though.”
“We want to use this as a foundation to make a larger open-world ga later. But we've run into a problem.”
Cypher Fox frowned as if it was giving him a headache.
“What kind of problem?”
“We can’t control the NPCs. For example, look here.”
Entropy clicked on the library and zood in.
“The emotion algorithm got tangled. When the fatigue level hits 100, they’re supposed to rest. But if that conflicts with a high diligence weight, they go right back to the library. It’s a loop.”
“Then what happens?”
“They sit there for 24 hours straight. Until all dissatisfaction stats hit MAX. Then they die.”
The log said that the NPC in question had drunk 37 cups of coffee today.
Root burst into laughter.
“That’s so solid realism. That’s literally an MIT student.”
“Don’t joke around. I feel like my head’s about to explode.”
“I told you to ditch that emotion graph. Just let them react randomly.”
“That kills the imrsion. I want NPCs that react like real people.”
Root and Entropy bickered familiarly.
Seo-ha felt a strange sensation.
All the concerns Entropy was talking about were things he had already worked through.
“Excuse !”
Although the purpose was different, he felt that collaborating with them could accelerate the developnt of the Synapse Engine.
“Hm?”
“Actually, I was making sothing similar to this.”
Seo-ha took out his laptop from his bag.
Tap, tap.
A black canvas appeared on the laptop screen, followed by square buildings and dots being arranged in sequence.
“What’s this?”
The hackers approached and examined the screen.
“Synapse, it's the engine I created.
I viewed the school as a set of resources and defined students as agents. They move according to decision functions.”
Seo-ha explained the operating principles of the Synapse Engine to them.
At first, they thought it was just a simple demo code.
But as Seo-ha’s explanation continued, their expressions began to change.
The dots moving between buildings would sotis collide, gather with a certain probability, then disperse again.
Cafeteria, classrooms, library.
In each space, the patterns of students gathering and dispersing were vividly alive.
“You said this was your old school, right? How closely did it sync with reality?”
Seo-ha paused briefly before answering.
“By the end, it was about 98%....
Spatial occupancy by ti, movent patterns, even average stay duration were nearly identical.”
The three simultaneously held their breath.
“Holy crap, even after pouring in half a year, our NPCs are still full of bugs....”
“He already made exactly what we wanted, didn’t he? Do you think this can be applied to MIT too?”
Seo-ha looked troubled.
“This is still experintal. Once the data builds up, it gets heavy.... MIT’s scale might be too much to handle.”
Cypher Fox spoke urgently.
“It doesn’t matter! We’ll take care of that! Please, just let us use this in our ga.”
Entropy nodded.
“I agree. Let’s integrate the Synapse Engine into our ga. We’ll rena the ga to ‘MIT Simulator’ too.”
Though it was just squares and dots, the algorithm applied to them was extraordinarily precise.
She knew she had no chance of catching up to Seo-ha’s simulator.
Root began writing sothing on a piece of paper.
“Let’s not just talk, let’s put it in writing.”
[In exchange for providing the Synapse Engine, 25% of the ga’s shares will be transferred to Yu Seo-ha.]
“Anyone have objections?”
A full quarter share.
But no one raised a single complaint.
“With that engine, we can create a next-level ga.”
“Let’s write up the revenue distribution, IP rights, and ethics clauses too.”
Entropy took the pen and began drafting the contract.
“Yu Seo-ha, we’ll take care of making the ga. You just need to provide the engine and help with optimization. What do you say?”
Seo-ha looked down at the contract.
The engine he developed would beco the heart of the ga they were creating.
It was an unexpected outco, but Seo-ha also wanted to see the future of this ga.
After deciding all that, Seo-ha wrote his na on the contract.
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