The Paper's Reviewer! (9,000 Words Tonight)

He compared the current logic behind quantitative investing with the paper he had just submitted.

At present, quantitative investing essentially used brute-force searches to exhaust every possibility.

There were simply too many variables in the market: policy, exchange-rate fluctuations, the balance of power between buyers and sellers-even the weather and people's moods could count as variables. Traditional models tried to cram them all into a computer and calculate the probability of every combination.

But this created a mathematical Achilles' heel: every additional variable caused the amount of computation to explode exponentially. By the time the computer finished, the best moment to enter the market would have long passed.

After being tempered by the process of writing his paper, Qi Hao no longer saw the stock market as a jumble of data. In his mind, it was a massive finite-state game tree composed of countless people's greed.

"Maybe there's no need for such a complicated factor model at all."

He suddenly remembered one of the fragments the Soviet System had given him as a reward. In it, he had seen a Soviet AI program predict the moves a McKinsey program would make in a game.

What if he applied that AI logic to the stock market?

He still wasn't quite sure whether the idea was sound. If he could confirm it, he could go reap a harvest in the American stock market and strike it rich!

When the bus reached the school gates, Qi Hao put his dreams of fortune aside for the moment and headed straight for his dormitory.

Back in his room, he opened his laptop and logged into the submission system.

He entered his username and password and went to his personal submissions page. His eyes fell on the paper's status.

It read "Editor Assigned"!

Qi Hao froze for a moment, then his eyes widened.

"That was way too fast, wasn't it?"

In the academic journal submission process, a paper had to pass through several stages between submission and final publication.

In other words, "Editor Assigned" meant one thing: his paper had passed the initial screening!

For an ordinary submitter, going from "Submitted" to "Editor Assigned" could take two weeks at best, or a month or two at worst. Some unlucky authors even had their papers rejected outright during the initial screening, without ever getting a chance at peer review.

Yet Qi Hao's paper had reached this stage only a week after he submitted it!

The system really wasn't kidding about letting me cut in line, Qi Hao thought.

He stared at the "Editor Assigned" status on the screen for quite a while, his feelings mixed.

Of course he was happy, but another kind of anxiety followed. Peer review came next: his paper would be sent to experts in the field, who would judge whether his research was valuable, his methods were sound, and his conclusions were reliable.

That would be the real test.

I hope the reviewers don't give me too hard a time...

Qi Hao prayed silently.

Across the ocean, in Massachusetts, United States, at the MIT mathematics department.

In an office piled high with books and papers, Professor Lauren was putting away the documents on his desk, preparing to leave for the day.

Professor Lauren was fifty-six years old and a senior professor specializing in combinatorics and game theory at MIT.

Most of his hair had turned gray, but he was in fine spirits. He had spent more than thirty years fighting his way through academia and had reviewed eight hundred papers, if not a thousand. He was one of the regular reviewers for "Discrete Mathematics."

That afternoon, another invitation to review a paper had arrived in his inbox from the journal's editorial office.

Lauren glanced at the email's subject line and sighed.

Review invitations had been coming in especially thick and fast over the past few months. He already had three papers waiting to be reviewed, and on top of that, he had a presentation to prepare for an academic conference next week. He really couldn't be in two places at once.

He opened the email and glanced at the paper's title and the author's institution.

It was from Huaguo, of all places.

Lauren raised an eyebrow.

He had reviewed quite a few submissions from Huaguo.

Objectively speaking, Huaguo scholars had made very noticeable progress in mathematics over the years. But there was also a phenomenon that gave him something of a headache: too many padded papers.

Submissions from institutions outside the top tier were especially prone to making insignificant tweaks to existing results, then repackaging them in different words as new findings. Their actual innovation and contribution were quite limited.

Lauren silently labeled this paper in his mind: in all likelihood, another padded paper.

But as a reviewer, he couldn't prejudge it because of the author's background. He still had to follow the proper procedure.

Lauren opened his contacts and found a name: Kevin, a doctoral student under his supervision.

He called Kevin.

"Kevin, can you come over for a moment?"

Five minutes later, a person with messy hair knocked on the door and entered.

"Professor, what is it?"

Lauren pushed the printed paper across the desk.

"Another editor has asked me to review a paper, but I really don't have time lately. Take a look at this one for me first."

Kevin took the paper and glanced down at the title and abstract.

"Absolute Pruning Inequality for Finite-State Game Trees..." He read the title aloud, then turned to the first page and glanced at the author's information. "From Huaguo?"

"Mm-hm." Lauren leaned back in his chair, his hands folded across his chest. "Read through it first and see if there are any obvious errors or holes in the logic. If it's padded, write out the reasons for rejection clearly. If there's really something to it, we'll talk then."

Kevin didn't leave immediately. Looking troubled, he said, "Professor, I'm busy wrapping up a project right now. It might be a few days before I can look at it."

"That's fine." Lauren didn't seem concerned. "The editorial office isn't pressing me anyway. A paper at this level usually isn't too urgent. Just look at it when you're done."

Giving an ordinary paper to a student to review was as normal as could be among reviewers.

"All right, Professor."

Kevin took the rather thin stack of stapled pages back to his cramped cubicle, which was crammed with scratch paper and coffee cans.

He casually tossed the paper awaiting review onto a pile of experimental data he had yet to process.

For a doctoral student like him, who was on the verge of having his graduation delayed, reviewing papers for his advisor was like unpaid overtime. He had no motivation for it!

Four days later, at the Fang Household.

Qi Hao had come to tutor for the second time.

This time, he arrived ten minutes earlier than he had on his last visit.

"You're here." Fang Jiaxue answered the door.

She wore a light blue sweater today, and her hair was tied in a simple ponytail. She looked fresh and neat.

Qi Hao entered Fang Jiaze's room and found that the kid was in considerably better shape than last time. At least he didn't have a face begging to be punched when he opened the door. Though he still said, "Tch, whatever," his workbook was already open to the pages Qi Hao had assigned last time.

What pleased Qi Hao even more was that Fang Jiaze had actually done more than half the problems on pages fifteen through twenty. Though he had gotten some wrong, at least he had put pen to paper.

"Well, not bad."

"So-so. Third best in the world." Fang Jiaze wasn't used to being praised.

Qi Hao didn't praise him any further. With a little boy who cared so much about saving face, measured approval worked better than excessive praise. If he went too far, the boy would think he was being coddled.

For the next two hours, Qi Hao continued teaching Fang Jiaze the same way he had last time.

This time, the subject was linear equations in one variable. He compared solving an equation to running a dungeon: the unknown x was the final boss's health, and the goal was to simplify the equation step by step until they calculated the boss's health.

Fang Jiaze listened with great interest, and he worked through the problems noticeably faster than last time.

By the end of the two hours, Fang Jiaze had used seven or eight sheets of scratch paper.

"All right, that's it for today."

"Oh... okay."

Fang Jiaze openly looked like he wanted more.

But he quickly caught himself, coughed twice, and slumped back in his chair. "I mean, I'm finally free. Hurry up and go. I'm going to play games."

"Before I come next time, do pages twenty-one through thirty."

"Got it..."

Qi Hao walked out of Fang Jiaze's room and ran into Fang Jiaxue in the hallway.

She was holding several sheets of A4 paper that looked like something she had printed out.

"Qi Hao, could I take a few minutes of your time?"

"Hm? What is it?"

Fang Jiaxue hesitated, then handed him the papers.

"My best friend is preparing for the provincial math competition. There are a few problems she can't solve, and she wanted to ask you for help, but something came up and she couldn't come today, so she asked me to show you the problems first... If you can solve them, go ahead, but it's okay if you can't. There's no pressure."

She spoke noticeably faster over the last few words, afraid Qi Hao would think she was deliberately making things difficult for him.

Qi Hao took the papers and glanced down.

Three problems.

They tested number theory, combinatorics, and numerical analysis, respectively.

These problems would already have been quite challenging for an ordinary college student, but they were nowhere near as difficult as the paper he had submitted.

A month ago, Qi Hao would have needed time to chew through them.

After all, he had previously been just an ordinary first-year mathematics student. The gap between competition math and classroom math was enormous, just as being good at driving didn't mean you could compete in a rally race.

Now things were different.

Since undergoing the system's training, Qi Hao had gone through over a full month of intensive mathematical thinking exercises. To complete that paper, he had chewed through nearly all the core material in fields such as combinatorics, graph theory, and number theory.

And he hadn't merely skimmed through books like someone swallowing dates whole. He had gained the understanding and ability to apply them at the level required for academic papers.

The topic the system had assigned him was far more difficult than competition math.

Once he had grown accustomed to working out the logic and deriving conclusions for himself in unfamiliar territory, his perspective on competition problems with standard solutions was completely different.

It was like training in real combat for a few months and then going back to compete in a forms tournament: you would find that both your perspective and your feel for it had changed!

When Fang Jiaxue saw that Qi Hao hadn't moved, she assumed he couldn't solve them.

She felt she shouldn't have listened to her best friend, so she said, "These are competition problems. It's perfectly normal not to be able to solve them. My best friend can't do them either, so don't feel pressured."

"Pressured?"

"Not really. These problems actually aren't hard." Qi Hao picked up a pen and began working.

Fang Jiaxue was dumbfounded.

They aren't hard... are they?