Chapter 204
Translator: Dreamscribe
When he closed his eyes, the world changed.
A space where noise was shut out, smells faded, and only equations remained. For Seo-ha, this state had been familiar for a very long time. As if sinking down into deep water, his consciousness quietly grew deeper.
Levin's note slowly unfolded inside his mind.
'Try every possible method at once.'
A sentence that looked simple.
But Seo-ha read the implication behind it. Levin had not been trying to talk about parallelizing an algorithm or about speed. He was talking about structure.
Levin had also attached one more clue.
'If you allocate more resources to the faster ones.'
The "simultaneously" that Levin spoke of surely didn't mean increasing the physical number of computations. The slow ones would fail to receive any share of resources. And so they would naturally die out.
'A structure where wrong answers destroy themselves?'
There was a problem. Without knowing the answer, how could he tell which one was fast?
He had fallen back into circular logic.
But Ducky did not stop thinking. Seo-ha stepped far back from the problem and continued his train of thought. His brain spun furiously.
Inside Seo-ha's head, the equations began to rearrange themselves.
Countless paths and candidates. Each one flowed along a different computational route. It was a task demanding immense computing power and reasoning ability, but for Ducky it was closer to play.
"Just because I don't know the answer doesn't mean there's no way."
Seo-ha grinned.
He just had to define speed as a different concept. Not a result-based figure, but an acceleration granted by logical consistency. A path with a logical flaw was bound to get snagged somewhere, no matter what.
Creak. Cree-creak.
His thinking was correct. The equations that had been trapped in circular logic, repeating their contradictions, began to lock into place.
Some candidates connected smoothly.
They moved on to the next stage naturally, without unnecessary branching.
Other candidates, by contrast, demanded a great many assumptions just to survive past a few steps.
"Ducky, this..."
Seo-ha realized it.
Ducky nodded as if in agreement.
'Yeah, that's right. Slowness doesn't refer to time.'
"It meant that the cost of survival is high."
After two hours, Seo-ha opened his eyes. Then he stepped up to the board and began writing equations frantically.
Time into space.
Sequence into distribution.
In Yu-Riemann Geometry, one could unfold a space that contained all of it.
Scritch-scritch.
His intuition was telling him that something tremendous lay at the end of this.
Seo-ha could not stop trembling.
* * *
"Seo-ha."
Mi-young knocked carefully on the door.
"...."
No answer.
When she opened the door, Seo-ha was slumped over his desk, asleep. A pencil was still gripped in his hand. All she could see was a board and papers packed densely with equations.
During the night, Seo-ha had failed to replenish his lacking sugar and in the end had dropped off as if fainting.
Slip.
She fetched the blanket folded in one corner of the room and draped it over Seo-ha's shoulders.
"Is oppa asleep?"
Seo-eun had woken up at some point and come out.
"Looks like he was working on something all night, doesn't it?"
"Mm."
Seo-eun looked around the room.
Gifted as she was, Seo-eun had only an undergraduate level of knowledge, and so she couldn't understand most of what was written on the board. Seo-eun bit her lip, then quietly went back to her own room.
Rrrk.
She opened the drawer of her desk.
A photo they had taken together by the Charles River, a stack of cards her brother had made for her by hand, a letter he'd written before leaving for boot camp, and an introductory textbook on Yu-Riemann Geometry that she had gone to great lengths to obtain without her brother knowing.
Seo-eun had known from early on that she was different from her brother.
Not only in ability but in temperament. Yet, though she didn't realize it herself, there was a reason Seo-eun had come to have a personality that grew bored and gave up easily.
The existence of a brother who was too brilliant.
'If there's something I don't know, I can just ask oppa.'
A habit ingrained since birth had stunted Seo-eun's growth. She had never once felt the thrill of arriving at an answer herself after a fierce struggle of thought.
At some point, Seo-eun had begun to feel an inexplicable frustration. Even just now, the fact that she couldn't understand the equations her brother had written had come to her as unbearable stress.
"Let me try this one on my own."
She opened the book.
On the back of the cover was her brother's face, looking somewhat nervous. On the facing page, a preface caught her eye.
"...The most beautiful moment in mathematics is not when you write down the answer. It is the moment when someone who has long been blocked by a wall suddenly understands, with their whole being, why it must be so. And that moment belongs to you alone, one no one else can intrude upon.
I hope this book may become a small stepping stone for you as you make your way toward that place."
Seo-eun read that passage over and over for a long while.
For the first time in her life, a desire to understand something churned violently within her heart.
Seo-eun wiped the corner of her eye once with the back of her hand. Then she opened to the first page and began to read.
* * *
After two weeks of meticulous review, NIST officially declared Utopia the standard. They had been hopeful, but even so had hardly dared believe it, and now that the next-generation cryptographic standard had been chosen, the lab was in a festive mood.
Since the matter was one the whole world had been watching, the volume of coverage in the Korean press was enormous, too.
[Korean-Born Cryptographic Algorithm Adopted as World Standard]
[Why Did NIST Choose Yu Seo-ha's Cipher?]
[The Key to Online Security Is Now in Korea's Hands. Praise Pours In for APEX Lab Korea]
The response from the public and experts alike was fervent.
In particular, correspondent Nam Gi-sun's in-depth feature piece read like a moving film.
The fear that a digital apocalypse was approaching, financial markets collapsing in real time, the citizens had witnessed all of it with their own eyes. And then, at the most decisive moment, a hero had appeared as if by magic. The ending, of course, was a happy one, accompanied by extreme dopamine and catharsis.
└This... it really saved the world, right? How are movie directors gonna make a living? When reality is this insane.
└Probably, right? Didn't you see the White House put out a thank-you message? lol
└Nah nah, don't overdo it. Even without Utopia they'd have blocked it with some other cipher. It got picked because its performance is the best, sure.
└I'm ruined. Bought gold right at the peak... Converted it to physical and stashed it in the closet, what am I supposed to do now?
└Where do you live?
The researchers were gathered in small clusters, shaking hands.
Along one side of the hallway, people who had only ever exchanged greetings now threw their hands up for a high five every time they came face to face.
One researcher asked in an excited voice.
"Aren't you happy, Director?"
"Because this is only the beginning."
The researchers nodded with firm expressions.
The adoption of the cryptographic standard was not a final period. From here on, Utopia would be placed in endless real-world combat.
Never-ending patchwork and update hell. That, of course, was not something he himself had to do. Seo-ha gave them a light nod and headed for the conference room.
The team members had taken their seats in the conference room early.
[Monday, 9 a.m., small conference room. There's something I'd like to propose about the team's next goal.]
A single text message Seo-ha had sent.
Theo barely managed to suppress his heart, which was pounding as if it might burst. Making ciphers had been fun, but it wasn't a challenge hard enough to draw out the team's full capabilities.
The tremendous catharsis he'd felt when they solved the Riemann Hypothesis. The more painful the process, the sweeter it was. Without realizing it, he and his teammates had become dopamine addicts.
"What'll it be? A Millennium Prize Problem, obviously?"
Ben asked, swallowing hard.
"It could be the Collatz Conjecture or the Goldbach Conjecture."
Any theory where Number Theory was the main focus.
Su-jeong clenched her fist.
"I'll put a vote on the Navier-Stokes Equations."
"I hope it's the P=NP Problem. I've been studying information theory like crazy lately. What do you think, Theo?"
Sri asked, looking at Theo.
"Hmm... I don't know. I have a feeling it might be something else entirely."
Ka-chunk.
Seo-ha opened the door and came in. Both hands full of printed materials. He must have been researching all night, because the blood vessels in his eyes had burst and they were red.
"Hello, everyone! Would you take a look at this first?"
He smiled brightly as he handed out the materials to everyone.
It was his own summary of what he'd worked out over the past few days. The team members took it without a word and began to read.
"Yes! It was the P=NP Problem after all!"
Sri cheered. But Cecilia poured cold water on it.
"I don't think so? Read further."
"Ah... this is."
Rustle.
As each page turned, the conference room grew quieter little by little. And before long, it finally fell into complete silence.
Seo-ha opened his mouth with a calm expression.
"Every time I read the P=NP theory, I felt something was off. It's certain that P is not NP, but it's like that isn't all there is to it?"
In his notes, Seo-ha had generated an energy called logical consistency.
It was fresh. An idea no one had ever tried. Theo glanced at Seo-ha's face.
'It's like the cellular activity of a living thing.'
In the structure Seo-ha had designed, each computational path functioned like a cell. The reason the P=NP Problem had gone unsolved for decades was simple. It was because infinitely proliferating problems drained the system's resources.
'So those are cancer cells, is that it?'
Seo-ha had arranged it so that only cells with traits suited to the goal could be supplied with resources and differentiate into the next stage. An approach made possible only because of Yu-Riemann Geometry.
Rustle.
Every one of the team members read the notes and sank into deep thought.
Cecilia broke the silence.
"Seo-ha."
"Yes."
She asked with a stern face.
"You do know that your hypothesis collides head-on with the mainstream opinion of the academic world, right?"
"Yes. I'm well aware."
In modern computer science and mathematics, the influence of the Turing Machine was absolute.
The so-called deterministic worldview.
"It won't just be your ordinary criticism. Your hypothesis denies the very theory of Computational Complexity that forms the foundation of computer science. The Turing worshippers will rage as if they've witnessed an act of sacrilege. Because it overturns the groundwork built up over the past seventy years."
Ben quietly raised his hand.
"My mother's a biologist, so I know a little, and this hypothesis has a much deeper connection to biology. If this is proven, it'll open a breakthrough for all sorts of research going on over there. In my opinion, they'll welcome it with open arms."
Su-jeong shook her head.
"I'm worried about the math side. The P=NP camp has an enormous volume of papers too, you know. And now you're telling all of them that they've been barking up the wrong tree."
P=NP was the holy grail of computer science. The papers pouring out in a single year numbered in the thousands.
That was because this problem was directly tied to the overall direction of computer science as a whole. The fields involved were varied, too. Artificial intelligence, cryptography, philosophy bordering on Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and on top of that, Seo-ha had dragged in biology, headed by evolutionary theory.
Theo spoke, clutching his throbbing head.
"It really does seem like we're going to make a lot of enemies this time."
He lifted the materials and read through them again.
Was he excited? His hands trembled.
Throwing down a challenge to Turing was absurd.
The axioms Turing had established were so absolute that most people wouldn't even have entertained the thought. But Theo had a conviction that Seo-ha's intuition was never wrong.
"Ah well, prophets are always persecuted, after all."
Ben's voice, sounding playful.
"Like Copernicus?"
"There's Galileo and Cantor too. Every one of them was probably treated like a madman in their own time, I'd bet."
Theo said with a fierce smile.
"Fine. If we make enemies, we make enemies. In exchange, let's win the war."
A nod.
As if of one mind, everyone wore an expression that was exactly to his liking.
*****
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