Chapter 30: Fading
Professor Buzard hit me up on Sunday before the start of the semester.
He mentioned that he doesn't really read the IJAM, but he had been talking about my proposal with someone on the team beforehand. That person told him about me publishing two theses last week.
So, he dug into my thesis on evolutionary algorithms; he found it pretty interesting. But he wasn't exactly an expert in that field.
He mentioned that they've mostly been working with training a neural network model before.
Once I laid it out that I was knee deep in another thesis tailored to their goal, he finally gave me the nod to join the team.
The whole shebang officially went by the name MetaMath Prover, and they got a crew of 15 mathematicians and over 10 computer science experts grinding away on it.
After a quick chat, he shot me over some papers, laying it down that the whole project was purely academic. The fine print promised that any results coming out of this thing would be for the greater good of mathematicians worldwide.
That might be the song they were singing, but under the hood, it wasn't exactly playing out like that.
Digging into the nitty-gritty, the London Imperial College was set to take the top spot, holding the primary ownership of the project and its end product. Meanwhile, the official squad grinding away would be in line for royalties.
The split would be 50/50 between the team and the college, which was the financial backbone.
It was all laid out with a professional touch, but still, like with everything... under the hood, there was a money game in play.