Translator: Dreamscribe
"It's cold."
Winter had arrived before he knew it.
'It's already been a year.'
It was last winter when he first ca to Boston to attend the Young Mathematicians Forum, and a lot had happened in the year since then.
Back then, Seo-ha was just a student who had been invited to the forum.
It was a ti when he had no idea he would end up climbing these snow-covered stone steps at MIT. But now he was attending university, and as he wandered around on and off campus, he had beco a celebrity whose face people recognized.
"Hey, Seo-ha!"
A classmate from the sa departnt waved at him as they passed by.
"Hello!"
Seo-ha exchanged the familiar greeting and walked into the library.
Through the library windows, snow was falling gently.
Every ti the wind blew in from the direction of the Harvard Bridge, the windows trembled ever so slightly.
'Things have cald down a lot, though.'
When the news first broke, he thought his phone was going to catch fire.
[MIT's Young Mathematician Frees a City from Traffic Hell!]
[An Undergrad at the Heart of Governnt Research - A Generational Shift in the Scientific World?]
Every ti Seo-ha saw those embarrassing headlines, he wanted to crawl into a hole. It was a result everyone had achieved together, and he felt uncomfortable being the only one in the spotlight.
Seo-ha was bewildered by the explosive public response.
It wasn't the first ti he'd been in the papers, but this ti the scale was incomparably larger than before.
If the articles had been about mathematics, it would have blown over quietly like usual.
But the impact of a topic like transportation, which was closely tied to people's daily lives, was beyond anything he had imagined.
The news coverage didn't end as a one-ti thing that day. Each newspaper dispatched its own reporting team and published in-depth stories.
On Reddit, ordinary citizens and experts gathered for heated debates.
[If this gets implented, does commute ti actually get shorter?]
-Isn't this just governnt showing off? I don't understand any of this math, algorithm stuff. Can soone just tell the conclusion?
└Things should get better than they are now.
└I heard they're running a pilot in Massachusetts. Anyone live there?
└I don't drive so I'm not sure, but the visible traffic congestion has gone down quite a bit.
└It's definitely working. The left turn from Massachusetts Avenue toward Longwood, that intersection is hell every morning. But now it's completely different.
└I cross there every day too and I can feel the difference for sure. Patrick did sothing good for the first ti.
[Who exactly is Yu Seo-ha from MIT?]
-Every ti the Boston traffic project cos up in the news, this student's na is always there.
But there's so little information. There's no profile on MIT's official site and no social dia accounts. How did an undergrad beco the research lead for a governnt project?
└My friend's a grad student in MIT's math departnt and said he's an absolute monster ㅋㅋㅋ
└I looked up his papers on the archive and they were seriously impressive. I heard it was an undergrad assignnt, and at first I was like, 'what kind of bad joke is that?' His mathematical ability is insane.
└Governnt officials aren't idiots. They gave it to him because he earned it. Look at his track record.
└I'm Korean and he's super famous in Korea too. People are expecting him to bring ho Korea's first Nobel Prize or Fields dal.
└This is that 'Ducky' ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└WTF! Seriously? Ducky the programr?
└Yep, we already know. He verified it on the developer forum. It's absolutely insane. All his STEM abilities are maxed out.
Even so, Seo-ha's daily life hadn't changed.
He still attended classes diligently and threw himself into assignnts. When he submitted all the P-sets that had piled up during the city hall project within a single week, even his professors were stunned. On top of that, every assignnt he turned in received an A.
Twice a week, he rode his bike to the bus stop to pick up Seo-eun, and in the evenings, he had dinner with his family.
"Oppa, how do I solve this?"
Late in the evening, Seo-eun brought over her howork.
Seo-ha's eyes narrowed as he looked at the problem.
'This is a linear equation?'
It wasn't the kind of problem that would co up in the lower grades of elentary school.
'Are they thinking of having Seo-eun skip a grade?'
Grade skipping was far more common in the United States than in Korea.
And right now, Seo-eun was ready to keep up with middle school material.
After thinking it over, Seo-ha said casually.
"I think if you think about it a little more, you can solve it on your own, Seo-eun."
"Hmm...."
Seo-eun placed her hand on her chin and struck a thinking pose.
The way she put on such a serious expression was adorable.
"Got it! I'll try doing it by myself."
"But let explain a similar problem for you."
He had never taught her equations before, but if she understood the concept, she'd be able to solve it easily.
"Really? Justin says thank you so much!"
When Seo-eun thrust the beaver doll forward, a coded voice played out.
-Thank you, I love you!
Seo-ha stroked Seo-eun's hair, then explained the concept of equations to her in detail.
* * *
Boston Transportation Authority headquarters, 7:40 AM.
CCTV footage showing the roads near Andrew Square appeared on the dashboard in real ti.
On one side of the screen, vehicle queues by intersection were displayed, while on the other, communication logs were scrolling up.
An engineer hurried through the door.
"Deputy Director, here's the data from the second week of the pilot."
"You have the statistics too?"
"Yes. Average commute tis have decreased by 19 percent, and ergency vehicle response delays are down 43 percent."
Alan reviewed the report. His expression softened as he studied the numbers.
"That's considerably better than last week."
"It is. I think it'll improve even more next week."
"The better things go, the more careful we need to be. Think of the first week as practice, and tell everyone not to let their guard down. Traffic is an unpredictable beast."
The engineer pointed at the monitor and smiled.
"This thing seems to know that already. It adjusts the signals like it's reading minds."
The sample size was still small, but as the signals grew smarter, the accident rate had also dropped.
Gifts from citizens were pouring into the transportation authority.
'This might be the first ti since the agency was founded.'
It was only natural that morale among the staff was soaring.
Looking to the side, he saw field agents in the corner loading firmware for the controllers they had spent the previous night repairing onto a cart.
Alan called out loudly to Tom.
"Tom! Today's the expansion to Kenmore, right?"
"Yes! That's the section citizens complain about the most."
"I bet their reactions next week will be sothing to see."
Tom headed out with his equipnt, a confident look on his face.
"Lisa! Is Seo-ha still saying he won't co to the press conference?"
Lisa made an apologetic face.
"Yes. He says he has too much studying to do and doesn't have the ti."
She had contacted him multiple tis, but Seo-ha wouldn't budge.
'What would I even do there? You know everything about the algorithm, Deputy Director, so please handle my part too!'
Alan was dumbfounded.
The dia attention currently focused on the signal optimization project was enormous. Over ten interview requests had co in from news outlets so far. Unable to respond to each one individually, the Boston Transportation Authority and MIT had decided to invite all the press outlets and hold a single press conference.
But the main figure himself was refusing to attend, leaving Alan in an awkward position.
'Building up so fa would help his career going forward....'
It was clear that press conferences ranked dead last on Seo-ha's list of priorities. He was thoroughly uninterested in anything outside of mathematics.
"Can't be helped. Let's do the best we can on our own. Tell everyone to study the manual Seo-ha wrote, inside and out."
Seo-ha had signed an official contract with the city and written a manual for staff training.
He had put trendous effort into making the manual easy to understand, but for the staff who had to study it, it was pure agony.
"Deputy Director! Isn't this a bit too much?"
"If I'd studied this hard in college, I wouldn't have ended up here."
A project that had shown no way forward despite its massive budget had been brought to life by a single genius.
Alan looked forward to seeing what else he would change in this country.
* * *
"Are you kidding ?!"
Root stared at the screen, fuming.
"What is it?"
Entropy and Cypher Fox stopped what they were doing and walked over to Root.
"Look. The Stanford kids are going nuts on Reddit again."
[MIT is just a na from the past. Stanford is the capital of mathematics now.]
-Have you seen the LOGIA rankings? MIT's been pushed out of the top spots entirely. When you think about it, it was an obvious outco. I heard their math departnt still insists on nothing but chalk and blackboards.
Tis have changed, friends.
└MIT was in first place just last week. When did it change?
└Caltech and Princeton are climbing up too. I think they got fired up because people kept posting their LOGIA scores on Reddit.
└Stanford's montum is kind of scary. But isn't that program made by them anyway?
└Yep, Stanford's AI team built it. The AI gives you problems matched to your level. I tried it too and my heart was pounding when the score ca up.
└This isn't so ga placent test ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└It's pretty similar though. Solve problems, get a score, get a rank. They must've gotten the idea from there.
└Apparently if you keep getting answers right, it eventually throws algebraic geotry at you ㅋㅋㅋ. The difficulty spike is absurd.
└You have to verify with a student ID to participate. That ans grad students can join too. It's probably crawling with PhD monsters.
└Honestly, it was about ti for the center of academia to shift to the West Coast. Just look at where Silicon Valley is ㅋㅋㅋ
"Entropy, do people in the math departnt not really do LOGIA?"
She thought for a mont at Root's question.
"No, I think quite a few do. Soone recomnded it to and I tried it.... I was A rank."
Tadadak.
She logged into the website.
"Huh? I'm B now?"
"That's because it's a relative ranking. Only 100 people get S, and only 1,000 get A. If you don't keep at it, you get pushed down."
"So what rank are you then?"
"Ahem! I'm not even in the math departnt."
"Then why don't you guys make a coding version of LOGIA?"
At Entropy's words, Root and Cypher Fox's eyes went wide.
"That's genius."
"Oh! I'm so down."
"Anyway, those Stanford punks are ticking off...."
Click.
Root clicked on the rankings tab.
[1st: Theodore Langford / S / Stanford / US / 998.7]
[2nd: Alfred Bennett / S / Princeton / GB / 992.1]
[3rd: Minoru Tanaka / S / Caltech / JP / 987.4]
[4th: Aiden Cole / S / MIT / US / 984.9]
[5th: Jung Min-woo / S / MIT / KR / 979.3]
[6th: Rafael Moretti / S / Harvard / IT / 971.1]
.
.
"Fourth place, seriously. And Stanford has the most people in the top 100, with 17."
"What's S ? Is that only given to one person?"
Root nodded.
"Yeah. That's only for whoever's ranked first. There's an emblem too, look."
Sure enough, next to the na there was a glittering crown.
Entropy snickered.
"Why are you so invested? Who even cares about that? You think the really talented people have ti for stuff like that? The British and Chinese students aren't even doing it."
"Entropy! This is a matter of pride."
Ding-
The rankings from 10th to 20th place shifted.
Students from Tsinghua University in China, and Oxford and Cambridge in the UK were climbing the rankings aggressively.
Cypher Fox leaned in to look at the monitor.
"Hm? There are a bunch of universities in the top 100 that weren't there before. University of Tokyo and KAIST. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the National University of Singapore too."
Root shrugged.
"See?"
"Huh? Should we actually be taking this seriously?"
While they were chatting, the door opened.
"Hello!"
Seo-ha walked into the lab with a bright smile.
All three pairs of eyes turned to him at once.
User Comments
0 comments from readers