105: Chapter 105 Special Report

On June 11th, under the introduction of Professor Gu Nanzhou, Jiang Lin made a trip to the Law School of Jiangda University.

Borrowing a small conference room, an associate professor specializing in intellectual property and an employee from the university legal affairs office helped him go through the compiled document "Authorizing Principles for Related Graphics, Names, and Popular Science Dissemination of Jiangs Brick".

By the time he came out of the Law School, it was already noon.

Jiang Lin invited several professors and teachers to go out and have a meal together.

After resting for a while in between, he returned to Jiangda University in the afternoon.

At the invitation of Jiangda University, he gave a special report on Jiangs Brick.

[Jiangs Brick: Non-periodic Monotile Construction Forced by Local Boundaries — A Special Report]

School of Mathematics, Jiangcheng University, Second Lecture Hall on the Third Floor.

A dark blue academic sign stood at the entrance.

Below the title, a line of small text was printed.

Speaker — Jiang Lin.

Next to the metal pillar of the sign, a temporary notice carrying a strong warning was carelessly taped with transparent adhesive tape.

[Admission to this academic exchange is by invitation credentials only. Please do not turn on any form of online live streaming, and do not take things out of context for editing and dissemination. Academia is sacred; please consciously abide by the bottom line.]

The physical space of the lecture hall was actually not large; with a standard tiered layout, it could hold at most one hundred and fifty people.

At this moment, it was packed to capacity.

Sitting off the stage were not only those researchers from the School of Mathematics of Jiangda University who had spent years burying themselves in old papers and in front of blackboards, but also more than half of the professors from the School of Physics doing condensed matter, crystallography, and statistical Physics.

Even in the few rows of seats on the right side sat the backbone members of the School of Computer Science working on algorithmic complexity and theoretical computer science.

In the core positions of the first row sat several visiting scholars who had heard the news, temporarily bought air tickets, and rushed over overnight from top universities in other provinces.

The seats had long been insufficient.

In the cramped aisles on both sides of the lecture hall, two rows of red temporary plastic folding chairs were jammed in.

Near the windowsill in the back row, a dense group of young doctoral students and auditors leaned and sat.

Relying on the revolutionary friendship forged with Jiang Lin in the Physics laboratory and pulling strings through their supervisors, Meng Che, Yin Hang, and Yao Siyu squeezed into a position near the edge of the second row.

Looking at Jiang Lin as he walked in, Meng Che and Yin Hang were as excited as two monkeys, frantically winking and making faces at him.

"Ahem..."

Just at this moment, two sound tests came from the microphone in the center of the podium.

Two minutes before the report officially began, Professor Gu Nanzhou stood up from the first row and walked straight onto the podium.

"Good afternoon, teachers and students. Today, the School of Mathematics of Jiangda University is hosting, and we have invited Jiang Lin to give a special report on Jiangs Brick."

He paused for a moment, cast a gentle gaze at Jiang Lin standing to the side, and then faced the audience again.

"Everyone present here is an expert in various fields. You all care about this magical geometric puzzle, Jiangs Brick, but I believe you care even more about the construction logic, topological structure, and brute-force proof methods hidden behind it. Therefore, I will now hand the podium over to Jiang Lin."

Finished speaking, Professor Gu Nanzhou decisively stepped back to the side.

Under the gaze of more than two hundred probing eyes, Jiang Lin walked up to the podium and stood in front of the walnut lecturing desk.

He wore an ordinary solid-colored short-sleeved shirt and black trousers. Slender and upright, he exuded a calm temperament incongruous with his age.

"Good afternoon, everyone. The topic we are discussing today is the existence of aperiodicity under finite local forcing."

On the projector appeared a grandiose tiling diagram of countless thirteen-sided Jiangs Brick tightly interlocking together.

Along with his deep tone, the report slowly unfolded.

Local forcing, substitution hierarchy, exhaustion of boundary ambiguity states...

He began to dismantle that maze-like proof edifice layer by layer.

And he tried his best to use intuitive geometric language to translate those obscure algebraic group theories.

Off the stage.

The people from the School of Mathematics were attentively following his proof chain and logical nodes.

The condensed matter researchers from the School of Physics, on the other hand, were secretly marveling at how this seemingly casual set of local adjacency rules could actually, on an infinitely extended scale, like some kind of invisible law, forcibly squeeze out the uncompromising rigid hierarchical skeleton within the entire two-dimensional plane.

The tone of Jiang Lin was restrained. Instead of boasting about the greatness of this brick, he consistently and objectively emphasized its boundaries and limitations.

"This set of methods is not a grand unified theory of the aperiodic world; it only solves the existence of a specific monotile. What it provides is a construction path under specific geometric conditions and a set of machine-verification paradigms, not a universal key that can unlock all substitution systems."

Over an hour later, the report entered its conclusion.

The projector turned to the last page.

What Jiangs Brick ended was the existence problem of aperiodic monotiles.

What it opened was the problem of computable aperiodic order.

MPS is not the answer itself, but a tool to find answers, eliminate pseudo-answers, and leave a chain of logical evidence.

These three sentences accurately summarized the historical positioning of the work done by Jiang Lin.

Neither humble nor haughty.

The lecture hall was quiet for a few seconds first.

This silence was not confusion due to not understanding, but rather the blank space needed for the brain to digest and reorganize after the impact of a huge amount of intellectual information.

A few seconds later.

An old professor sitting in the first row gently patted his palms once.

This solitary applause was like a signal.

Immediately following that, the entire lecture hall erupted into warm and lingering applause.

This applause had nothing to do with the age of Jiang Lin.

It was simply the highest tribute paid to a piece of extremely aesthetic mathematical proof itself.

After the applause subsided, it entered the most hardcore question-and-answer session.

The first few questions were quite conventional, mainly focusing on the details of discrete geometry.

A researcher doing graph theory stood up and asked: "Student Jiang Lin, may I ask if the thirteen-sided polygon is the minimum side-number limit for this type of monotile? Is it possible for us to find ones with fewer sides, such as a decagon or hendecagon?"

Jiang Lin answered candidly: "I must say, this is a difficult open problem. The role of Jiangs Brick is to prove the existence of aperiodic monotiles. Finding the monotile with the minimum number of sides may require abandoning my existing substitution system based on hexagonal grids and developing brand-new geometric tools."

Another young scholar asked: "Have you considered making convex deformations to Jiangs Brick? There are really too many concave and convex corners currently."

Jiang Lin shook his head: "Currently, I do not see any direct path. The core boundary forcing mechanism that Jiangs Brick relies on is built on the geometric locking effect produced by those specific concave and convex corners. Once forced to flatten into a convex polygon, all local forcing conditions will instantly collapse."

An associate professor working on high-dimensional manifolds raised a more ambitious question: "Is it possible to generalize this two-dimensional substitution system based on local forcing to three-dimensional space, and construct a single three-dimensional brick that can aperiodically fill the entire universe?"

Jiang Lin paused for a rare few seconds, rapidly deduced the complexity of the three-dimensional Euclidean group in his brain, and slowly said.

"In three-dimensional space, the escape methods of locally legal states in three dimensions will be much more complex than in a plane. A dead end in two dimensions might just be a simple folding in three dimensions, or perhaps one might encounter a completely insurmountable topological high wall. Therefore, I do not have any conclusions about this right now."

...

After the questions in the pure mathematics direction were gradually digested, the people from the School of Physics and the School of Materials started eagerly trying it out.

A professor working on condensed matter mentioned the three-dimensional growth mechanism of quasicrystals, and another researcher in the materials direction excitedly inquired about the feasibility of single-component self-assembly in the preparation of nanomaterials.

Facing these cross-disciplinary questions, the answers of Jiang Lin remained extremely restrained.

"Senior predecessors in Physics and materials science, Jiangs Brick can at best serve as a theoretical model of local rules on a purely geometric level."

"Mathematical perfect tiling does not equal material atoms in reality being able to grow out in the laboratory reactor."

"In actual crystal growth, there are thermodynamic fluctuations, unavoidable lattice defects, substrate potential field interactions, and kinetic traps. The system is highly likely to get stuck locally in a metastable state and be unable to grow outward into a global aperiodic structure."

"These complex free energy evolutions in the physical world are not things I have resolved in this purely geometric paper."

Just as the discussion across the venue was gradually subsiding and Professor Gu Nanzhou was about to pick up the microphone to announce the end of the report.

Sitting in the back row of the lecture hall, near the windowsill,

a man around fifty years old, with graying hair and wearing an old plaid shirt, slowly raised his hand.

Throughout the entire hour-and-a-half report, this man was like a forgotten stone carving.

He had hardly communicated a single word with anyone around him; he just lowered his head, frantically writing and drawing in his notebook with a ballpoint pen, occasionally looking up at the screen.

A staff member trotted over and handed him the microphone.

Holding the microphone, the man stared at the still-illuminated hierarchical skeleton diagram of Jiangs Brick on the projector, his brows tightly knitted into a knot.

His gaze did not look like an elder looking at the achievements of a younger generation, but rather like an old hunter engaging in a final eye-to-eye confrontation with an old opponent that had tortured him for many years.

"Ahem, Student Jiang, I do not work on tiling or geometry, and my next question might be a bit layman. If you think it is absurd, you do not have to answer."

The voice of the man was somewhat hoarse, exuding the fatigue of staying up late all year round.

"Please go ahead." Jiang Lin slightly bowed and made a gesture of listening.

"I work on Additive Combinatorics."

As soon as these four words came out,

several senior pure mathematics professors in the first row curiously turned their heads around.

Because this was definitely not a branch of mathematics that a layman could casually blurt out.

"My name is Professor Han Yanshan." The man introduced himself.

Professor Gu Nanzhou slightly turned his head, rapidly searching his brain for the list of the domestic academic circle, and quickly recalled this name.

Professor Han Yanshan.

A senior professor in the direction of Additive Combinatorics at a key university in another province.

He had done very beautiful generalizations regarding Freiman-type structure theorems.

But later, as if he was bewitched, he persistently chipped away at difficult and profound hard bones like approximate groups and small sumsets for a long time.

His papers in the industry were very low-yield; he had not published articles for several years.

He had already been somewhat marginalized in mainstream view.

But those who truly knew the ropes in the circle all knew that Professor Han Yanshan was like a lonely Yugong, spending most of the effort of his life at the foot of several big mathematical mountains where even winners of the fields medal had returned in failure.

"This set of things of yours..."

Holding the microphone, Professor Han Yanshan spoke at a very slow pace, as if weighing the power of every single word.

"In essence, it is actually a set of local rules that forcibly squeezes out a global rigid hierarchy, right?"

As he spoke, he used his other hand to gesticulate forcefully in the air.

"You merely gave that small circle of purely local adjacency constraints around. As a result, the entire infinitely extended two-dimensional plane was irreversibly forced by this weak force to grow into a rigid, deterministic, and never-repeating grandiose skeleton."

"That is correct." Jiang Lin nodded affirmatively.

The other party claimed to be a layman, yet hit the nail on the head regarding the soul of his paper.

Professor Han Yanshan took a deep breath, his eyes holding the exhaustion and focus that only comes after being worn down by a problem for a long time.

"In my field, there is also an old problem. It is, of course, not the same thing as the brick you talked about today. But their temperaments are somewhat similar."

The lecture hall, which had still been whispering among itself, instantly fell so silent that you could hear a pin drop.

"Leaving aside the most general integer version for a moment, let us talk about a finite abelian group, or to put it more cleanly, a finite set A in a finite field vector space."

Professor Han Yanshan raised his hand and made a vague gesture in the air.

"Let us talk about a finite abelian group, or to put it more cleanly, a finite set A in a finite field vector space."

"If, after adding itself, its scale does not expand by much—that is, |A + A| ≤ K|A|."

"This condition is actually very weak. It does not pointwise prescribe how each element should be arranged. It merely states overall that when you add it to itself once, it doesn't expand by much."

"Yet, it is precisely this combinatorial condition, which is so weak it hardly feels like a constraint, that gives us reason to believe that behind this seemingly loose set, some kind of low-complexity structure close to a subgroup or subspace should be hidden."

At this point, Professor Han Yanshan gave a wry smile and shook his head.

"The problem is that proving this to be as strong and clean as polynomial level is simply too difficult."

Hearing this, several professors sitting in the front row completely understood which great mountain he was referring to.

Someone whispered to the person next to him: "In the Finite Field Model, this is the famous Marton conjecture. It is also often placed under the entire family of problems known as the Polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa. This is the holy grail that Terence Tao and Gowers' crowd have been eyeing all along."

His eyes, hidden behind thick lenses, stared at the young man on the stage, who was much younger than the doctoral students he mentored.

"I originally just wanted to come and join the bustle today, but the more I listened to you dissect that brick, the more my scalp tingled. The more I listened, the more wrong it felt."

"Your approach of forcing a global rigid hierarchy out of weak local constraints, and then welding the boundaries shut with finite states..."

Professor Han Yanshan's voice echoed in the lecture hall.

"Could it be that, from a deeper foundation, it is the same type of problem as what we have always wanted to do?"

As soon as these words fell, it was like a depth charge.

The eyes of several professors in pure mathematics could not help but reveal a look of shock.

If such a fundamental structural analogy spanning different major categories of mathematics truly held, its academic value would be immeasurable.

It was far beyond comparison with a single aperiodic brick.

And standing on the stage was Jiang Lin.

At that instant, it was as if something heavy in his mind was lit up without warning.

It was not because of Professor Han Yanshan's question that a sudden flash of inspiration in his mind brought forth a proof or answer.

Rather, Professor Han Yanshan's question, half consultation and half self-confirmation, suddenly cast a set of tools that Jiang Lin was familiar with to the point of instinct toward a direction he had never looked at before.

There was a sense of clarity as if problems were being reclassified.

Jiang Lin's breath stagnated for half a second, and his brain began to spin at extreme speed.

When he crafted Jiangs Brick, what was the core action that he repeatedly polished and carved into the folds of his brain?

It started from weak, purely local adjacency relations.

Layer by layer, spanning a grand scale, it forced out the rigid global aperiodic skeleton.

Then, using cumbersome counting groups and finite-state enumeration, it welded all ambiguous boundary cases shut tightly.

And in Professor Han Yanshan's words, what was the core action of the Marton conjecture, that great mountain that had trapped the field of Additive Combinatorics for decades?

It started from the weak statistical condition of small sumsets.

Layer by layer, according to scale, it extracted the rigid approximate algebraic structure hidden behind the chaotic numbers.

Furthermore, it had to suppress the scale expansion during this process strictly within the polynomial level.

These were two completely different matters.

One grew in the soil of discrete geometry, discussing shapes, translations, and coverings.

The other grew in the soil of Additive Combinatorics and number theory, discussing addition, density, and isomorphism.

Between the two lay professional barriers spanning a hundred thousand miles, resembling two parallel lines that would never intersect.

Yet, at the philosophical mathematical core, they were actually asking the same thing.

By what right could a weak local part force out a rigid global whole?

What was even more important...

In the eighth Wasteland time that Jiang Lin had just concluded not long ago...

In order to analyze that plasma anomaly, he had painfully chewed through decades of high-order Physics theories.

He had forcefully ground himself from an ordinary plasma learner into someone who had mastered the grand physical language of multi-scales.

The renormalization group, scale decomposition and coarse-graining of energy methods, the discrimination of relevant operators and irrelevant perturbations...

According to scale, stripping away high-frequency noise layer by layer and extracting the low-frequency core structure...

This massive tool library used in Physics to handle phase transitions and critical phenomena...

At this moment, in Jiang Lin's mind, it was like another knife that had just been sharpened on a whetstone.

And the blade of this knife happened to be aimed precisely at the mathematical mountain that Professor Han Yanshan had spent decades grinding against.

"Professor Han."

Jiang Lin finally spoke.

"In the underlying philosophical sense of local weak constraints forcing out global structure, you are right."

"They are indeed relatives."

As soon as these words came out...

Professor Han Yanshan's somewhat turbid eyes lit up instantly.

In the front row of the lecture hall, several senior professors sat up straight in shock.

Jiang Lin was actually endorsing this crazy cross-field analogy in public.

But Jiang Lin's next sentence ruthlessly suppressed the trace of light that had just ignited in Professor Han's eyes back down.

"However, Professor Han, between these two problems, at the level of existing mathematical tools, there is a distant gap."

Jiang Lin's tone did not change at all.

"The approximation here in Jiangs Brick is absolutely deterministic and rigid. Every single one of my local tiling states either legally survives or illegally dies. Every single one of my boundary cases can either extend to infinite distance or be ruthlessly rejected by a topological dead end. There is no gray middle ground here."

"As for the category of problems like PFR and the Marton conjecture that you mentioned," Jiang Lin looked at Professor Han Yanshan, pointing out the gulf between them directly, "that is approximate; it is a structural theorem in the statistical and average sense. It fundamentally does not deal with pointwise absolute rigidity, but rather with covering, additive energy, density increments, approximate homomorphisms, and structures in the sense of the majority of elements."

"From my side of this black-and-white hierarchical skeleton, wanting to transition smoothly to your side of the approximate algebraic structure carrying a flavor of probability and statistics..."

Jiang Lin shook his head, speaking his judgment honestly.

"In between, there is a thick layer of conversion mechanisms. As to what this layer of mechanism actually is, and how to use my toolset to build that bridge across, I cannot explain clearly right now."

Professor Han Yanshan stood there, staring at the young man on the stage for a full several seconds.

Under Jiang Lin's remarkably candid analysis, the exhaustion and obstinacy he had accumulated from circling the exact same problem for years slowly melted into a soft sigh.

"Not being able to explain it is normal, completely normal."

Professor Han Yanshan waved his hand, a relieved smile instead emerging on his originally taut face.

"Being able to hear you say here that they are indeed relatives makes this trip of mine today not in vain."

When he handed the microphone back to the somewhat dazed doctoral student beside him, he added another sentence toward the stage.

"Classmate Jiang, I am just someone who has spent too much time lingering around this problem; I might have thought a bit biasedly and gone a bit too far, don't let me lead you astray."

"This is not wild imagination."

Standing on the lecture platform, Jiang Lin solemnly bowed slightly toward Professor Han Yanshan's direction.

Professor Han Yanshan was slightly taken aback, his body, which was about to sit down, freezing there.

Jiang Lin did not explain further, gripping the mouse on the podium again.

"Alright, let us continue with questions, the next one."

Afterwards, there were several conventional questions, which Jiang Lin answered one by one with his expression as usual.

It was as if that cross-field collision moments ago, which had almost triggered a mathematical earthquake, had never happened at all.

By evening, the lecture officially ended.

Although the lecture had adjourned, the crowd did not disperse immediately.

Especially that group of teachers and doctoral students in the direction of mathematics, who were still gathered in twos and threes in the front row of the lecture hall, heatedly discussing the analogy Professor Han Yanshan had thrown out just now.

Some felt that this was completely whimsical, pulling things way too far, and not at all a matter of the same dimension.

Some felt that this analogy was very beautiful intuitively, deserving to be called a fairy descending from beyond the heavens, but if one attempted to execute it, it would easily lead to deviations and madness.

There was also an old professor who specialized in analytic number theory, who whispered to his companion: "Where is something as wicked as PFR something that can be casually touched just by listening to a lecture on tiling geometry? Although the child Jiang Lin is smart, it is better for him not to wade into this muddy water."

On the other side of the podium...

"Classmate Jiang Lin, is it convenient to take a few minutes of your time?"

Jiang Lin, who was leisurely organizing his lecture notes, turned around.

A man with a slightly receding hairline walked over quickly and handed over a simple white business card.

Jiang Lin took the business card and glanced at it.

School of Computer Science, Jiangcheng University.

Chen Qiming.

Research Directions: Compiler back-end optimization, high-performance base libraries, program synthesis.

This was a systems engineer who dealt with machine bottom-layer instruction sets every day.

"Teacher Chen, hello." Jiang Lin nodded politely.

"Classmate Jiang Lin, hello. Let me state first, I am not someone in tiling or pure mathematics."

Chen Qiming spoke extremely fast, carrying the crisp decisiveness typical of a coder.

"To be honest, those group theory and geometric proof details about Jiangs Brick in your presentation just now left me completely baffled."

As soon as these words came out...

Several people nearby who had originally wanted to gather around and consult Jiang Lin on geometric questions somewhat awkwardly slowed their paces, wanting to hear what this computer guy was going to do.

Chen Qiming did not care about the gazes of others at all, directly placing the laptop he brought onto the podium.

Then, entering the password, he brought up a complex interface, turned it around, and faced Jiang Lin.

What was displayed on the screen was neither that Jiangs Brick that had stolen the spotlight nor any aperiodic substitution system.

Instead, it was a Profiler flame graph that looked like a nightmare to a systems programmer.

Among the dense charts on the screen, there was a large area of dark red representing extremely high CPU cycles.

And this dark red area was weirdly piled entirely on top of a few unassuming function names at the very bottom:

rank5 _ inline

small _ sort _ bucket

top3 _ window

median7 _ fast

Chen Qiming pointed at the flame graph that looked like it was bleeding, looking at Jiang Lin earnestly.

"When you were explaining your MPS on the stage just now, someone doing low-level systems like me actually heard an entirely different matter."

He tapped the screen with his finger.

"In order to find the correct brick, you exquisitely compressed a spatial state so vast that it even tended toward infinity into a form that machines can perform exhaustive searches on, humans can review, and the final result can leave behind an irrefutable chain of topological evidence. This state compression and search capability, Student Jiang Lin, on the optimization side of our underlying computer libraries, might, and I mean might, be of tremendous use."

Jiang Lin narrowed his eyes slightly, looked at the glaring flame graph on the screen, and said, "Teacher Chen, does this look like a massive data stream processing or auditing pipeline?"

"You are right. This is just an ordinary business data auditing pipeline."

Chen Qiming was somewhat surprised by Jiang Lin's sharpness.

"There are no currently trending large language models (LLMs) here, no complex AI algorithms, and no high-sounding theories that look like they can be bragged about at top conferences. The hottest and most time-consuming parts are actually some low-level short array rank calculations, tiny window sorting, finding the top-k extrema, and tiny hash bucket operations."

As he spoke, Chen Qiming double-clicked the mouse and opened the function named median7_fast.

The code was unexpectedly short.

It was entirely handwritten in C inline assembly, less than twenty lines long, and filled with obscure register operations and conditional move instructions.

"You look at this and also feel that such things are negligible, right?"

Chen Qiming let out a wry smile.

"The overhead of a single call for such a microkernel applet is indeed a pathetic few nanoseconds or a dozen nanoseconds. Placed in a single-line benchmark test, whether it is a bit faster or a bit slower is simply not worth mentioning."

At this point, Chen Qiming suddenly raised his head, staring intently at Jiang Lin with burning eyes.

"But in real batch processing scenarios, it gets mechanically called hundreds of millions of times a day."

Jiang Lin's gaze fell upon those ordinary function names on the screen.

In an instant, his thoughts uncontrollably drifted back to the Wasteland World once again.

He remembered that under harsh conditions, in order to parse heterogeneous plasma data,

the old factor library he had painfully maintained on his aged terminal.

There, it was similarly filled with tens of millions of tedious small sorting operations.

Back then, he only felt that those things were annoying, a swarm of mosquitoes that could never be swatted to death.

And now,

Chen Qiming, a systems engineer from the Real World, had keenly placed these problems formally on his desk.

"Teacher Chen means to borrow my MPS search framework to exhaustively search for the optimal solutions of these tiny code programs?" Jiang Lin asked directly.

"I am not sure."

Chen Qiming shook his head candidly.

"This is undoubtedly a crazy idea, so I deliberately stayed behind today precisely to ask you to judge it personally. Between the search problem for this kind of program and the finite state tiling search you handled for the Jiangs Brick, is there even the slightest similarity in their underlying mathematical structures?"

Jiang Lin looked at the function names on the screen once again, his brain rapidly beginning to abstract the essence of this code.

"Teacher Chen, the input space of these functions is finite, right?"

"Many of them are finite."

Chen Qiming replied immediately.

"For instance, tiny sorts of fixed length with only five, six, or eight elements. Theoretically, its input state space can be completely covered and verified by brute-force full permutations. Or, more advancedly, we can use satisfiability modulo theories solvers to carry out strict logical equivalence proofs."

"Then what about performance? Can the merits and demerits of performance be accurately measured and scored in practice?" Jiang Lin continued to press.

"Completely. We have mature baselines and rigorous stress-testing scripts. We can even capture perf counters on different CPUs."

At this point, Chen Qiming sighed and said helplessly,

"The problem now is that for these core codes, the dividends of manual optimization have been squeezed to the absolute limit by old bones like us. Wanting to squeeze out another nanosecond of performance relies purely on fragile human eyes and pitiful brainpower to permute and combine assembly instructions, making it extremely difficult to advance systematically."

Jiang Lin added without hesitation, "Teacher Chen, you are well aware that if a certain candidate code output by a brute-force machine search framework, no matter how fast it runs on the test set, as long as its correctness cannot be strictly proven mathematically, such code must never be used in important industrial-grade systems."

"Right, exactly. If you give me a piece of witchcraft code that is extremely fast but occasionally errs, I truly dare not merge it into the trunk."

Chen Qiming sighed with emotion as if he had met a soulmate.

"This is also the fundamental reason why I didn't go looking for AI heuristic search today, but insisted on talking to you instead. What we need is one hundred percent mathematical correctness."

As he spoke, Chen Qiming operated the mouse and dragged an inconspicuous zip archive file on the desktop to the center of the screen.

microkernel_rank_sort_baseline.zip

"Inside this is a set of minimal problem sets compiled by our team," Chen Qiming pointed solemnly at the archive and said, "including basic rank5, sort5, and top3-of-8. The original baseline implementation code, test validation scripts, and some performance benchmark data are all inside."

Chen Qiming looked at Jiang Lin, his tone so sincere that it even carried a hint of entreaty.

"Student Jiang Lin, could I trouble you to take this archive back and casually spend a little time glancing at it? If you feel it's unsuitable, or that the structure cannot be migrated at all, then just consider that I made a presumption today and asked a layman's question that wasted your time."

Jiang Lin looked at the archive on the screen and mused, "Teacher Chen, I can confirm that this is not a layman's question."

Hearing this, Chen Qiming's tense shoulders relaxed slightly, and he looked eagerly at Jiang Lin with an expectant expression awaiting good news.

Seeing this, Jiang Lin did not hold back from conducting an in-depth cross-domain structural analysis.

"In the massive Jiangs Brick problem, the objective of the brute-force search in the MPS framework I developed is those obscure local geometric tiling states. But over here with you, the target it needs to search becomes the program states of low-level machine instructions."

"A candidate geometric tiling method with great potential must rule out all topological escape paths to survive. A candidate microkernel code must rule out all extreme erroneous input test cases to be adopted."

After explaining, Jiang Lin summarized:

"The forms of expression are different, but in terms of deep core logic, they both rely on: a massive finite state space, local tiny transformations, and global correctness."

"So, there is similarity?" Chen Qiming's breathing grew somewhat rapid.

"Yes," Jiang Lin said with certainty.

But he immediately poured cold water on it.

"But we cannot simply copy the MPS code of Jiangs Brick directly, because this is a completely different new world of yours."

"That goes without saying." Chen Qiming expressed understanding.

"Furthermore, Teacher Chen, there is an extra dimensional problem that programs have over geometric tiling." Jiang Lin looked at the screen, his eyes deep. "In mathematics, as long as it is proven correct, that is the end of it. But here, correctness does not equal speed. Your search space is filled with correct yet inefficient garbage code."

Hearing this, Chen Qiming's originally tense expression finally relaxed, and he laughed heartily.

Being able to see through this difficulty at a glance showed that Jiang Lin had completely understood the core of the problem.

Jiang Lin wasted no more words and operated the mouse to save that archive into the USB flash drive he had brought with him.

"Teacher Chen, I'll go back tonight and take a look at rank5 and sort5 first," Jiang Lin said.

"Great, sorry to trouble you. First judge whether this problem is worth investing energy into doing; I'm not in a hurry for the final conclusion on my end," Chen Qiming said cheerfully.

Lu Zhixing, who had been standing by the side all along, finally couldn't help interjecting a sentence when he heard this.

"Jiang Lin, is this considered developing an application for the Jiangs Brick?"

"No," Chen Qiming shook his head quickly.

Jiang Lin also decisively shook his head to correct him: "Teacher Lu, this is a cross-domain migration of the underlying thought of MPS, and it does not fall under the scope of the Jiangs Brick."

Lu Zhixing asked quizzically: "Cross-domain? Going from painstakingly searching for bricks on a geometric plane to frantically searching for programs in the underlying system?"

Jiang Lin did not answer directly.

He created a new folder under his working directory.

[MPS-Kernel]

Below the folder name, he typed another line of remarks: Provable Microkernel Search.

Then, he explained to Lu Zhixing: "This should be called upgrading from searching for provable local geometric structures to searching for provable, verifiable, and empirically measurable local program structures."

Hearing this incisive summary, Chen Qiming finally calmed down completely.

It was like someone who had been groping through a complex system in the dark for a long time suddenly seeing a perfect tool fall snugly and seamlessly into the exact interface they yearned for.

...

The presentation ended, and the crowd dispersed.

Evening was approaching, and the lingering rays of the early summer sunset brilliantly dyed the sky of Jiangcheng University red.

Lu Zhixing accompanied Jiang Lin as they walked outward.

When passing the corner of the long corridor, Lu Zhixing suddenly turned his head to glance at Jiang Lin.

"Jiang Lin, do you happen to have any inspiration for that outrageous Additive Combinatorics problem Professor Han Yanshan asked just now?"

"Why would Teacher Lu think that?" Jiang Lin asked back in astonishment.

"Perhaps it's directly telling me this."

"Teacher Lu, you are overthinking it; that was just a very beautiful analogy." Jiang Lin lightly brushed the topic aside.

Lu Zhixing did not tactlessly continue to press further.

For an unfathomable student like Jiang Lin, what kind of trump cards was he holding in his hand after all?

When would he be willing to lay his cards on the table?

Nobody knows.

At the entrance, that dark blue temporary standing sign was still standing there forlornly.

Jiang Lin withdrew his gaze.

Twenty days later,

he would enter the Wasteland World once again.

On this exploration luggage and task list for the Wasteland, as things stood, an extra line of public task architecture would inevitably have to be added.

[Project Codename: MPS-Kernel (High-Speed Microkernel_Machine-Proved Search)]

Of course, there might also be this:

Local weak constraints → Global approximate structure.