The Tenth Question: Do Automata Dream of Calculating Device Sheep?

Hearing that Wang Qi had another new paper, the Free and Unfettered Cultivators present wore varying expressions.

Some of the Free and Unfettered Cultivators were rather dismissive. Ximen's Twenty-Three Questions were a benchmark in the field of mathematics—or rather, twenty-three benchmarks. Solving any one of them meant one was qualified to attain the Free and Unfettered Dao.

Among the Twenty-Three Questions, the second and tenth questions were the most special. That was because these two questions concerned the very foundations of mathematics.

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem was the proof for the second of the Twenty-Three Questions.

For questions of that sort, an ordinary cultivator would be lucky to solve even one. How many discoveries on the level of incompleteness could a cultivator encounter in an entire lifetime?

Yet some other cultivators—Feng Luoyi, for instance—looked thoroughly horrified.

"Four-Faced" Ma De'en had the mildest attitude among the Gottingen Sect members. He had attained the Dao by solving the third of the Twenty-Three Questions. For that very reason, he felt rather favorably toward Wang Qi, who had solved the second question. Seeing that the atmosphere had grown tense, Ma De'en tried to ease it and asked Wang Qi, "What is your paper about?"

"Ximen's Twenty-Three Questions, the tenth question."

Ma De'en did not react at first. "What?"

"Ximen's Twenty-Three Questions, the tenth question." Wang Qi repeated himself. "I solved the tenth question. The one concerning decidability."

"What... the tenth question has been solved too?" Ma De'en was momentarily dazed.

He had seen plenty whose theoretical level far surpassed their cultivation realm. But someone who had reached this extent—this was truly his first time seeing one.

After the Twenty-Three Questions had been posed, he had merely spent one or two years solving the third question. Even so, he had been called a prodigy of his