Peng Xun brought Luo Yao to a place that looked like a garden.
There were only a few people inside, each busy with their own thing.
Some were playing games, some were studying billiards, and others were drawing something.
As Luo Yao passed someone who was drawing, he deliberately took a look at what the person was working on.
To his surprise, the person was drawing an EDA architecture diagram.
"Did you design this yourself?" Luo Yao asked with a somewhat strange expression.
The designer looked up at Luo Yao and said proudly, "Of course. What do you think?"
"Not much," Luo Yao said without much interest.
"What nonsense are you talking about, kid?!" The other person was clearly irritated.
"You only modified this architecture based on Synopsys's. Synopsys has 4,463 patents. If you develop according to this architecture, can you guarantee you won't infringe on their patented technology?" Luo Yao spoke calmly, completely unfazed by the other person.
The man glanced at Peng Xun standing beside him, his face quickly reddening. Being exposed by Luo Yao in front of Peng Xun made him uncomfortable. "Can't I just draw it for fun?"
"What's the point of drawing something that imitates others? It's a waste of time." After tossing out that assessment, Luo Yao headed farther inside.
He had recognized the Synopsys architecture at a glance. Luo Yao really was capable.
Peng Xun smiled slightly, glanced at the male student drawing the architecture diagram without saying anything, and followed Luo Yao.
Once they went farther in, the people there were even crazier.
In the work area, people obsessively fiddled with the equipment at hand or stared fixedly at their computers, all apparently immersed in their work.
They did not notice Luo Yao and Peng Xun's arrival at all until Peng Xun crossed the work area, walked to a door, and opened it.
"Hey! See that? Another newcomer is here!"
"Guess how old this one is. I'll go first—twenty!"
"You can't assume he's twenty just because he's tall! His face looks so young. He's definitely only eighteen or nineteen!"
"Edra, why do you look so excited?"
"Why shouldn't I be excited? Not only is this little guy handsome, what if his IQ turns out to be even higher than yours?"
"Higher than mine? I don't know about that, but it definitely won't be higher than Sergei's!"
The people sitting in the work area were the geniuses of the Genius Program.
Other than focusing on their own research, they were only interested in others like themselves.
Now that they saw a newcomer entering the testing room, every one of them paid attention.
Smart people were hard enough to find, much less geniuses like them. Huaji had only recruited nine people across Blue Star so far, so whenever they discovered one of their kind, they could not help wanting to learn more about them.
After arriving at the testing room, Peng Xun had Luo Yao sit in the only chair in the room, then said, "This test will be handled entirely by the machine. Every question you need to answer will be projected onto the wall in front of you. Just say your answer aloud. If you don't know it, simply say 'pass.'"
"There are thirty questions in total, and you have one hundred minutes."
"Once time is up, your score will be calculated automatically whether or not you have finished."
"This score is tied to your rank and salary level, so answer carefully."
After explaining the situation, Peng Xun went out to make a phone call.
Immediately afterward, a mechanical female voice sounded.
Welcome to this test. Please look at the question below...
Find the smallest positive integer L satisfying the following condition: for every L-element subset A of the set S = (1, 2, ··, 2012), there exist three distinct elements A1, A2, and A3 in S such that A1 + A2, A2 + A3, and A3 + A1 are all in set A.
Luo Yao had not done math problems for several days, so he could not help feeling delighted when he saw the question before him.
Other people wanted to perish together with mathematics when they saw math.
But Luo Yao only felt happy when he saw it!
The dopamine neurons in his hypothalamus had been stimulated and were releasing dopamine molecules at that moment!
Combinatorics and number theory?
Easy.
Since A1 + A2, A2 + A3, and A3 + A1 were all required to be in set A, the difference between the smallest and largest elements had to be less than or equal to L - 1. Otherwise, it would be impossible to find A1, A2, and A3 satisfying the condition.
Let A1 < A2 < A3, x = A1 + A2, y = A2 + A3, and z = A3 + A1, then x
x + y + z = (A1 + A2) + (A2 + A3) + (A3 + A1) = 2A1 + 2A2 + 2A3.
2A1, 2A2, and 2A3 were all integers, so their sum was even.
Therefore, x + y + z was the sum of three even numbers, so x + y + z was even.
Numbers and symbols flew through Luo Yao's mind. Every step was clear, but they took no more than an instant in his brain. He quickly reached the conclusion.
Throughout the entire test, Luo Yao did not show the slightest bit of nervousness. Instead, the executives watching him in the monitoring room were becoming anxious.
It turned out that the moment Peng Xun left the testing room, he called Zheng Mengrong.
"President Mengrong, Luo Yao has entered the testing room. Would you like to see how things are going?"
After thinking it over, Zheng Mengrong knew that Luo Yao was special to Huaji, so she put aside what she was doing and went to the monitoring room.
By then, the monitoring room was already packed with people from the CEO's office.
"Why are all of you free today? Aren't you working on the Pangu EDA arrangements?" The entire monitoring room was filled with people from the CEO's office. Zheng Mengrong had never seen such a scene before.
Chairman Lu Gao looked at Zheng Housheng and said, "Didn't President Zheng say that Luo Yao's IQ might be even higher than Sergei's? I got curious and came over."
"We're also curious about just how high Luo Yao's IQ is, considering he managed to develop Pangu EDA."
Zheng Housheng laughed loudly and pointed at Luo Yao on the screen. "See for yourselves. Among all the geniuses we recruited before, who solved problems this fast?"
Everyone looked and indeed saw Luo Yao rapidly giving his answers.
"Could Luo Yao have seen these questions before?" Lu Gao felt that Luo Yao's solving speed was downright terrifying. Number theory problems involved plenty of calculations, didn't they?
But why had Luo Yao seemingly calculated them mentally in less than five minutes?
"Impossible. The questions are randomly generated by the system. Luo Yao could not possibly have seen them in advance."
"Wait, look. Why has Luo Yao stopped?"
Zheng Mengrong's words successfully interrupted the others' discussion. Lu Gao looked up at Luo Yao and found that he was no longer looking at the questions. "The later questions are probably too difficult!"
"It's only question eighteen. Looks like he's inferior to Sergei!"
No one else spoke. They merely watched Luo Yao with concern.
On the screen, Luo Yao sighed boredly and lowered his head.
He even muttered, "Are they all this easy? I don't even want to do the rest. What a waste of time."
After the people in the CEO's office heard that clearly, their expressions all became complicated.
Was he showing off?
"Did I hear that right? He thinks the test questions we gave him are too easy!"
"Heh, this kid is pretty good at putting on an act! Maybe he can't solve the later questions, so he's making excuses for himself?"
"He's so young, yet he's already showing off like this. What will he be like in the future?"
"Old Peng, you'll have to keep a closer eye on this kid from now on!"
"That's strange. If this is his level, how did he create the Pangu EDA software?"
Zheng Housheng and Zheng Mengrong said nothing, merely continuing to watch Luo Yao.
Soon, Luo Yao moved again on the screen.
"Forget it, I'll just finish first. I never expected this score to be tied to rank and salary." After muttering softly, Luo Yao began answering questions again.
The people in the monitoring room initially still had smiles on their faces, but as Luo Yao continued answering, their smiles gradually froze.
One question, then two...
At Luo Yao's astonishing answering speed, the remaining twelve questions were quickly solved.
Your total answering time was fifty-seven minutes.
Calculating your score...
Luo Yao looked at the prompt on the wall without much concern, wondering whether this thing could really measure it.
On the other side, the people from the CEO's office stared tensely at the wall, afraid of missing the moment the result was announced.
But after a minute passed, the test result still had not appeared.
"What's going on? Could the machine be broken? Why is it still calculating?" Zheng Housheng decided he would have someone speak to the development department later. What kind of program took a full minute to respond without producing a result?
Could there be a bug?
As a program produced by Huaji, wasn't this embarrassing?
Congratulations, all of your answers were correct!
Your IQ test result is: above 230.
For the first time, the people in the CEO's office saw such an absurd figure. They stared at the data on the wall again and again.
"Not over one hundred, not two hundred, but above two hundred and thirty?" Lu Gao stared at the displayed number as if questioning his life, feeling as though his eyes were playing tricks on him.
"It's hard to imagine this is the test result. Could the program be broken?"
"I've never seen a number this high. There's a good chance the program made an error. You all saw it too—the system took a full minute to give the answer!"
As the others speculated, Zheng Housheng immediately had Peng Xun call the people in charge of the Genius Program test and ask them to check whether there was a problem with the program.
Very soon, the programmer who checked the backend logs replied, "President Peng, there is absolutely no problem with the testing program. Everything is normal."
Peng Xun glanced at the others and asked the question they most wanted answered. "Then why did the system freeze for a minute before giving the result?"
"President Peng, the result in the Genius Program test is calculated based on factors such as the number of correct answers, the test taker's reaction speed, and total answering time. The previous highest score was 165."
"So, we set it so that whenever the score exceeds 165, three additional calculations are performed on top of the original one for verification."
"Then why does the displayed result say above 230?"
"Because the current question types can only measure an IQ score of around 230. Please don't think that's absurd. The questions in the world today can only measure up to the number 230."
"If you really want to ask why, perhaps it's because no one has had an IQ capable of reaching 230 so far, so no one has been able to devise test questions for scores above 230."