How Cunning!

"You could try the national competition directly," Xu Zhengping said earnestly. "The transformation technique in the third problem would catch the national judges' eyes. Honestly, the depth of thought in your solutions has already gone beyond the scope of the provincial competition. If you can keep this up..."

"Teacher Xu!" Chen Xiang realized there had been a misunderstanding and hurriedly interrupted him, a complicated expression on her face. "Um... I didn't solve these problems."

"You didn't?"

"No." Chen Xiang's voice grew a little quieter. "It was... a friend of a friend of mine."

"A friend of a friend? Which university? What major?"

"The University of Electronic Science and Technology. First-year mathematics student."

Xu Zhengping paused.

"The University of Electronic Science and Technology? Has he competed in mathematics competitions before?"

"My friend said he hasn't."

The mathematics department at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China was good too, but there was indeed a gap between it and Sichuan University's, especially in competition training. It was somewhat unusual for a first-year mathematics student from the University of Electronic Science and Technology to produce solutions of this caliber without having competed before.

"What a shame."

"Is the student a boy or a girl?"

"A boy."

Xu Zhengping sat back down, apparently thinking about something.

"Please pass a message on to him for me."

"If he's interested in taking the graduate entrance exam someday and wants to learn more about it, tell him he can contact me."

Xu Zhengping rummaged through a drawer, pulled out a business card, and pushed it over. "He can pursue competitions if he wants, but honestly, with the way he thinks, competitions would be a bit of a waste of his talent. He's better suited to research."

Chen Xiang took the card and glanced down at it.

Xu Zhengping

Associate professor, Sichuan University School of Mathematics

Research areas: number theory and combinatorics

Chen Xiang put the card away and, unwilling to give up, asked, "Then, Teacher Xu, is there any way to learn his approaches to these three problems?"

"Well..."

Xu Zhengping tactically leaned back against his chair. Instead of answering immediately, he looked at Chen Xiang with a kindly gaze.

That look made Chen Xiang shiver for no apparent reason.

"Chen Xiang, let me ask you something. If I threw you into the Pacific Ocean right now, do you think you could learn to use sonar to catch fish like a dolphin?"

Chen Xiang was dumbfounded. "Huh? That... that's crossing species, isn't it?"

"So there's your answer."

Boo-hoo, Teacher, that's so discouraging.

Chen Xiang felt somewhat helpless as she walked out of Xu Zhengping's office.

She hadn't expected that kid's approaches to be right. From what Teacher Xu had said, even if she wanted to learn them, she couldn't.

Chen Xiang took a deep breath, composed herself, pulled out her phone, and opened QQ.

[Xiangxiang]: I just showed his solutions to Professor Xu from our math department. Professor Xu said he's good, and that he can contact Professor Xu if he wants to take the graduate entrance exam someday. Professor Xu should be able to give him some advice.

[Fang Jiaxue]: Really? Is he that good?

[Xiangxiang]: Why would I lie to you? Professor Xu even gave me a business card to pass on. Honestly, I don't want to believe it either. It's such a blow.

[Fang Jiaxue]: How hard were the three problems you gave him, exactly?

[Xiangxiang]: They're all recognized as difficult problems. I'd never seen his methods before, and they weren't in the standard solutions either.

[Fang Jiaxue]: Ah, Xiangxiang, you really were trying to make things hard for him?

[Xiangxiang]: Feeling sorry for him?

[Xiangxiang]: [meme.jpg]

[Fang Jiaxue]: Get lost, Red Egg. I just didn't expect them to be that hard.

[Xiangxiang]: Now you can rest easy. He shouldn't have any trouble teaching Xiao Ze. Oh, right, please tell him about the business card. Professor Xu was quite serious.

[Fang Jiaxue]: Okay, I'll tell him next time he comes to teach.

Chen Xiang lowered her phone and leaned against the corridor wall.

Outside the window stood the old ginkgo trees of Sichuan University Wangjiang Campus. Sunlight filtered through the branches and leaves, scattering flecks of gold across the ground.

She looked down at the three problems she hadn't been able to solve herself. Remembering Qi Hao's approaches, a surge of pride rose within her.

Hmph!

I refuse to believe I can't learn them!

That kid has never competed in a math competition. I should still have a chance!

Starting today, I'm going to grind through problems like crazy!

She stuffed her phone into her canvas bag, turned, and strode toward the library.

Her footsteps fell firmly on the tree-lined path, as though she were marching off to defeat an enemy.

United States, MIT mathematics department doctoral students' office area.

Kevin pulled a can of Red Bull from the refrigerator, gulped down half of it, and finally finished organizing the project data that had been piling up for nearly a week.

He slumped in his chair, ready to relax.

He opened YouTube and watched a couple of funny cat videos, laughing so hard he nearly sprayed Red Bull onto his keyboard.

When he was done laughing, he happened to notice a printout on the corner of his desk, buried beneath a pile of scratch paper, and suddenly remembered something.

Oh, right, there was also the paper Professor Lauren had asked him to review.

Kevin sighed, pulled out the thin stack of pages, and brushed off the dust on them.

"I'd better hurry up and finish it so I can turn it in."

He leaned back in his chair and opened to the first page.

"Within the framework of finite perfect-information game trees, this paper proposes a new set of absolute pruning inequalities and proves that, under certain state-space constraints, a strict polynomial upper bound exists for the complexity of searching for optimal strategies in game trees..."

Not bad. At least the abstract didn't read like one of those crank papers that immediately boasted, "We have completely solved such-and-such problem."

He continued reading.

The introduction.

The paper first reviewed the classical results of the Alpha-Beta pruning algorithm, then identified a gap in the existing literature concerning estimates of the upper bound on pruning efficiency. Under certain symmetric game structures, the complexity estimates provided by the traditional framework were relatively loose.

Kevin nodded. There was nothing wrong with this part; it was pretty good.

But starting on the third page, he found that the style changed abruptly.

Kevin squinted at it for half a minute, feeling as though his brain had crashed.

"What the heck is this..."

He flipped back to the definitions and found that the author had indeed provided rigorous definitions, but those definitions were themselves built on a series of lemmas he wasn't familiar with.

The sources of these lemmas were all listed in the references.

Refusing to be beaten, Kevin flipped straight to the reference list on the last page.

Then he froze.

Five old references, and every one of them was in Russian!

Kevin stared at the letters he couldn't recognize at all, his brow furrowing deeper and deeper.

"You've got to be kidding me!"

Kevin leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, his expression gradually shifting from confusion to impatience.

In academia, especially in an environment like MIT, where English was the absolute lingua franca of scholarship, a paper submitted to an English-language journal had its central argument built on a pile of Russian references?

Kevin quickly made a judgment.

Either the author really had dug up a batch of overlooked Russian results from some obscure corner and built on them.

Or the author was deliberately citing obscure, old references to create an information asymmetry. After all, if the reviewer couldn't read Russian or find the original texts, they couldn't verify whether the proof was correct and could only choose to trust it or give up on the review.

Kevin's intuition-or rather, his laziness-told him the second possibility was more likely.

How cunning!

I almost fell for it.

Kevin slapped the paper down on the desk. "Give me a break. What use are Soviet-era references now? Even if they are useful, how could a Huaguo author have gotten inspiration from them?"

He had heard that people from Huaguo even struggled to read English references, let alone grapple with Russian ones whose letters they couldn't fully recognize. The complicated grammar of a Slavic language, combined with the outrageously convoluted mathematical terminology, was practically an incomprehensible heavenly script.

The more Kevin thought about it, the more he felt he had seen through the paper's author.

A paper that couldn't be verified by a reviewer was, by the logic of academic peer review, equivalent to a substandard paper.

That wasn't his problem. It was the author's.

If you submitted to an English-language journal, you should cite English references, or at least rewrite the proofs of those Russian lemmas in full in the paper so reviewers could verify them independently.

If you didn't do that, you couldn't blame the reviewer for not buying it.

Kevin stood up, fully convinced he was in the right, and headed for Professor Lauren's office with the paper!

A few minutes later.

"Professor, I've finished reading that submission from Huaguo."

Lauren was replying to emails at his computer. He looked up when he heard Kevin.

"Oh? What did you think?"

Kevin put the paper in front of Lauren and opened it to the references.

Lauren glanced down, raising his eyebrows.

"Soviet references?"

"Yes, they're all old Soviet references. I couldn't find an English version of a single one."

"The paper's central proof relies heavily on the conclusions in these references. The author directly cites at least five or six lemmas he claims come from these Russian references, but provides no independent proofs in the main text."

Lauren picked up the paper and leafed through it. "So you're saying you can't verify the paper's chain of proof?"

Kevin nodded.

Lauren pondered for a moment. Kevin had helped him review papers many times, so he trusted Kevin's judgment.

He soon made a decision. "Then write up the review comments as usual, and I'll submit them."

"Reject it?"

"There's no need to be so absolute." Lauren shook his head, displaying the seasoned judgment of an experienced reviewer. "We'll give it a major revision, but make sure to point out its problems in the review comments."

Kevin smiled, understanding at once.

This was actually a gentle way of rejecting a paper in academic peer review. On the surface, it offered a chance to revise, but in practice, the requested revisions were almost impossible to complete within a reasonable time.

"Understood, Professor. I'll have the comments written this afternoon."

"Mm." Lauren put his reading glasses back on and turned his attention to the computer screen. "Oh, right, make sure your wording is professional. You can say the references are outdated, but don't make it too subjective. The editor will be reading it."

"Don't worry, Professor."

Meanwhile, in the mathematics department at Stony Brook University in New York State.

Professor Alexei was turning on his computer.

He had received his doctorate from Moscow State University in 1982, studying under a corresponding member of the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences. After the Soviet Union collapsed in the early nineties, he, like many Soviet mathematicians, had made his way to the United States and eventually put down roots at Stony Brook University.

That day, in his capacity as a reviewer, he opened his list of papers awaiting review.

The page redirected, and the review system's backend finished loading.

He scanned the list of submissions awaiting review and finally stopped at one title: "Absolute Pruning Inequalities for Finite-State Game Trees and a Proof of the Existence of Optimal Strategies."

It looked somewhat interesting.

Professor Alexei clicked his mouse and opened the paper...