Zhao Yiyi handed Durian another ping-pong ball.
Durian casually tossed it, sending the ball into the audience and triggering another chaotic scramble, like young people fighting over a bridal bouquet at a wedding.
Another boy went up onstage. He had clearly come prepared and wrote a problem on the whiteboard without hesitation.
1-2=
As soon as he finished, a wave of suppressed laughter rose from the audience.
It seemed nobody planned to go easy on this orangutan. Every problem was deliberately made harder.
Zhao Yiyi looked embarrassed too. She had only said that the equations had to contain positive integers; she hadn't said the results had to be positive integers as well. One small oversight had slipped through.
Durian stared blankly at the whiteboard for a long time, then gestured that it wanted to solve the problem.
Zhao Yiyi picked it up so its pen could reach the whiteboard.
After hesitating briefly, Durian wrote down the result.
1-2=0
"I'm very sorry, but we haven't taught it negative numbers yet," Zhao Yiyi explained. "For the next problems, please give it equations with integer results. Don't give it negative results! Thank you, everyone!"
The audience responded with good-natured laughter. Nobody would look down on an orangutan for getting a problem wrong. Being able to write the result as zero was already impressive enough!
Durian received another ping-pong ball and threw it toward the audience.
A bald middle-aged man went onstage and quickly wrote a multiplication problem.
99×99=
Zhao Yiyi picked Durian up and helped it set up the problem vertically on the whiteboard.
This problem was clearly far too difficult. Durian still hadn't memorized the multiplication table.
Its method was to draw circles on the whiteboard, using nine rows and nine columns of circles to represent nine times nine. After confirming twice