My IQ Increases Year by Year

Chapter 167: Chapter 111: Can’t Sleep

His mind was crystal clear.

Alarmingly so.

A moment ago, to solve Chu Ge’s infinite loop, his brain had been forcibly rebooted.

Now, the raging machine in his mind wouldn’t stop.

In the few minutes he’d spent scanning the screen, he hadn’t just seen the local deadlock.

He’d also spotted the flaw in the overall macro-architecture of Chu Ge’s code.

Although the local fix worked, that underlying retrieval method was bound to cause a collision between left-spin and right-spin extreme values when faced with a larger data volume.

Lu Jia’s breathing became ragged.

He was like a neat freak who’d spotted a crooked painting.

The painting hadn’t fallen off the wall.

But he knew it was there, crooked, and if he didn’t fix it, his mind would be stuck on it.

Lu Jia turned over in bed.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

But his mind was swarming with unclosed variables.

He even began to automatically complete the other half of the equation in his head.

He couldn’t stop.

Twenty minutes passed.

Lu Jia abruptly threw back his covers.

In the dead silence, he made a despairing discovery.

He still couldn’t sleep.

「Across the hall.」

There was a knock on the door of Room 215.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

Wang Dayong, having just set down a motherboard, pulled open the door.

Chu Ge stood outside, drenched in sweat, clutching a computer case that was radiating heat.

"Dayong, give me a hand."

Chu Ge panted as he walked inside.

"My computer’s about to catch fire. Let me borrow your fan to cool it down."

Chen Zhuo, sitting in his chair, turned his head.

He looked at the computer case on the floor—its side panel off, an acrid, burning smell wafting from it—then at Chu Ge, who was covered in sweat and gasping for breath.

"You managed to run your CPU until it’s smoking in the middle of the night."

Chen Zhuo twirled a black pen in his hand, his voice tinged with amusement.

"What were you even running on this second-hand Pentium 3? Simulating a nuclear blast?"

Crouching on the floor, Wang Dayong chuckled and chimed in.

"Seriously, the thermal paste is practically melted. What the hell were you doing?"

Chu Ge collapsed onto the empty chair beside Wang Dayong. He scrubbed his face in frustration and let out a heavy sigh.

"Don’t even ask. I took a freelance gig from a hacker forum—optimizing the underlying concurrent data retrieval for an image gallery site. The bounty was fifteen hundred yuan."

Chu Ge pointed a thumb at the case, which was still radiating heat. His face was a mask of frustration.

"The data volume was huge. I was stuck in a nested infinite loop and couldn’t get out. Then, all my frantic typing drove my roommate, Lu Jia, nuts."

Recalling the scene, Chu Ge’s voice was laced with disbelief.

"The kid climbed down barefoot, eyes all red, and just threw this insane topological substitution matrix at me. The moment I plugged in the formula, the deadlock instantly resolved."

At this, Chu Ge ran a hand through his hair in frustration.

"But that’s where it all went wrong. The local deadlock was fixed, but the concurrent data requests instantly maxed out. The entire data stream flooded in, and my crappy fan couldn’t handle the heat. The whole thing just crashed."

Chu Ge looked up at Chen Zhuo, his expression helpless.

"And it gets worse. After plugging in his matrix, my current, flat macro-architecture can’t handle that massive amount of data. Even if Dayong helps me get the temperature down, trying to force it will just fry the system."

Chen Zhuo listened quietly to the whole story.

He didn’t ask any follow-up questions or comment on the bounty.

He simply reached out and took the crumpled notebook from Chu Ge’s hands.

He glanced at the chaotic flowcharts Chu Ge had scribbled inside.

Then, on the back of a blank page, Chen Zhuo casually sketched an extremely simple inverted tree diagram.

The lines were clean.

"Slice it from the bottom up. Reverse topology."

Chen Zhuo handed the notebook back, his voice even.

"You don’t need to call all the underlying data. Just set a boundary threshold. If you run it with this tree-like architecture, your machine can handle it."

Chu Ge looked at the diagram.

The look in his eyes changed in an instant.

He stared at the lines on the paper, and quickly simulated the data flow in his head.

This approach—peeling away from the root up—completely bypassed the most computationally expensive flat-search method.

Chu Ge looked up, his eyes filled with astonishment as he stared at Chen Zhuo.

Just as Chu Ge was staring in a daze,

the door to Room 215, which hadn’t been shut properly,

was pushed open.

Lu Jia stood in the doorway, dressed in wrinkled pajamas and slippers.

He was clutching several sheets of scratch paper covered in equations, and the red veins in his eyes were even more pronounced than before.

The three people in the room all turned to look at him.

Lu Jia gritted his teeth, walked past Wang Dayong, and stopped in front of Chu Ge.

He slammed the papers onto the desk.

"If I don’t finish solving the other half of that equation..."

Lu Jia’s voice was tinged with a desperate obsession, his eyes rimmed with red.

"All these incorrect variables are at war in my head."

He stared at Chu Ge.

"I can’t sleep at all."

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