They Didn't Work Hard Enough. How Is That My Fault?

Fifteen minutes later.

Qi Hao froze the moment he walked through the door.

Why are all the university leaders here?

He sighed inwardly and greeted them politely.

"Have a seat." The university president pointed to a chair that had been brought in beside them.

Qi Hao sat down and waited for them to speak.

Old Wang was the sort who couldn't keep things to himself, so he spoke first.

"Qi Hao, do you know you're third on Big Eye's trending list?" He then opened his phone and handed it over.

Old Wang turned the phone around. The screen showed Big Eye's trending list.

Qi Hao scanned it from top to bottom:

Number one: Liu Xiang returns from injury to prepare for the Asian Games

Number two: scalpers queue to snap up the iPhone 4

Number three: #Freshman math student's paper suspected of fraud#

Number four: contestant on a satellite TV dating show makes a startling statement

Third.

Right behind Liu Xiang and the scalpers.

Liu Xiang was the pride of the nation, and scalpers queuing to buy iPhones were a hot topic across the country. He was just an ordinary university student who had written a paper.

Did that really warrant a spot on the trending list?

"Qi Hao, answer me honestly. Did you write a paper some time ago and submit it to 'Discrete Mathematics'?"

"Yes."

"And cite five Soviet Union-era papers in it?"

"That's right."

Old Wang softened his tone a little. "Then let me ask you this: why didn't you use other sources instead of those five? Wouldn't English ones have worked? 'Discrete Mathematics' is an English-language journal. Wouldn't citing English sources have been more convenient? Why did you have to use sources from the Soviet Union in Russian?"

"Was it a moment of carelessness?"

The other three knew Old Wang was subtly leading him, but could only pretend they hadn't heard.

Everyone present looked at Qi Hao.

"Teacher Wang, it's not that I insisted on using sources from the Soviet Union. It's because, in this particular research area, the English sources aren't sufficient."

"How are they not sufficient?" It was the first time the dean had heard such an outrageous excuse. "Game tree pruning isn't an especially obscure field. Knuth and Moore's classic 1975 paper was in English, and the later work by people like Judea Pearl was also published in English. There are at least dozens of relevant English sources, and you're saying they aren't sufficient?"

"Dean, I've read all the papers you mentioned."

"In Knuth and Moore's 1975 paper, they analyzed the number of nodes visited by alpha-beta pruning in the best case, proving that the number of nodes searched in that case was O(b^(d/2))."

"Judea Pearl's work around 1980, including the Scout Algorithm and the asymptotic analysis of random game trees, was also very important."

"But those works all have one problem in common."

"What problem?" Old Wang pressed.

"Their analytical frameworks are all essentially based on probabilistic models."

"Starting with Pearl, United States academia took a probabilistic approach to analyzing the efficiency of game tree pruning. They assumed that node values followed some random distribution, usually independent and identically distributed, and then derived the expected pruning efficiency under that assumption."

"This approach produced a great many papers from the eighties through the nineties, and the later introduction of some Monte Carlo methods also followed the same direction."

"But that isn't what my paper is about."

"My work concerns an inequality characterization of deterministic finite-state game trees under absolute pruning conditions, as well as a rigorous proof of convergence."

"To establish precise bounds of this kind, what's needed isn't probabilistic tools, but combinatorial analysis and extremal methods."

"The American literature really is weak in this area. It's not that they can't do it, but that their mainstream academic tradition doesn't follow this path."

"Since the eighties, American research in computer science and discrete mathematics has leaned more toward algorithmic complexity theory and probabilistic methods. When it comes to estimating precise bounds for combinatorial structures, especially using classical analytical methods to obtain asymptotic characterizations of discrete structures, they really haven't built up as much as the Soviet Union did."

"By contrast, the Soviet Union's school of mathematics, particularly the combinatorial analysis schools at Moscow University and Leningrad University, followed a completely different technical path from the fifties through the eighties, conducting extensive extremal and asymptotic analyses of discrete structures, including game trees."

"Looking back now, some of their methods were even more general than Knuth and Pearl's frameworks. But because of the language barrier and the information blockade during the Iron Curtain era, most of these results were published only in journals within the Soviet Union and were never translated into English."

"They didn't work hard enough. How is that my fault?"

Qi Hao was truly at a loss for words. At the time, he hadn't even been able to find a few alternative English sources, so he'd had no choice but to pile on all five sources from the Soviet Union.

Alas, why can't you Western academics work a little harder?

If Westerners had worked even a little harder, I wouldn't have been put on display online for everyone to gawk at today.

Old Wang was dumbfounded.

How did this kid end up blaming Western academia?

But on second thought, that did seem to be the case.

During the Cold War, Soviet and Western academia had been almost like two parallel worlds, and a great many Soviet-era mathematical results still hadn't entered the international academic mainstream.

The Soviet Union's school of mathematics had been seriously underestimated, particularly in combinatorics and the analysis of discrete structures.

The dean's expression changed too.

He had originally come to scrutinize this student, but what Qi Hao had just said was clear in its logic, accurate in its citations, and precise in its judgments. It didn't sound made up on the spot. It felt like this kid really knew his stuff.

In other words, this wasn't how a student who had fabricated citations in a paper would behave.

If Qi Hao was lying, then his acting skills could only be said to put a host of award-winning film and television actors to shame.

Seeing that the others had said nothing, the president had to ask himself, "What you just said may be right, but those five sources from the Soviet Union you cited can't be found anywhere online. There are no digital records or DOI numbers. The people reporting you online say those five sources don't exist at all and that you made them up yourself."

"How do you explain that?"

Qi Hao said, "Many academic journals in the Soviet era operated completely differently from journals today. Their circulation was very small to begin with, and some even circulated only within research institutes. After the Soviet Union collapsed, a great many academic archives were scattered. Some were taken over by the Russian Academy of Sciences, some were collected by university libraries, and others... were simply lost."

"As of now, less than thirty percent of Soviet-era mathematics journals have been digitized and included in international databases. If you judge whether a source from the Soviet Union exists by search results from Elsevier, Springer, or MathSciNet, then at least eighty percent of the Soviet Union's mathematics papers don't exist."

His words were restrained, but everyone present heard the implication.

The fact that something couldn't be found on Google Scholar didn't mean it was fake. It only meant the source of information was too narrow.

The dean gave Qi Hao's words serious thought and asked a crucial question. "Then how did you find those five sources?"

"Russian domestic websites and libraries," Qi Hao said.

"Our university library?"

"The provincial library."

At that point, the president posed the question he most wanted to ask. "How did you understand the Russian sources?"

"You're a freshman. I don't even know whether you've passed the College English Test Band 4, yet you can read academic papers in Russian? Academic Russian from that era reads like an encrypted telegram. Even doctoral students get headaches looking at it. How did you understand it?"

"...I taught myself some Russian."

"Taught yourself?" Old Wang looked as if he'd heard something out of Arabian Nights. "You taught yourself Russian? Do you know how hard Russian is? A single verb seems to have more than a dozen forms, and you're telling me you taught yourself?"

"I just taught myself some basics, then did intensive training specifically on terminology used in mathematics papers." Qi Hao had prepared his answer long ago. "The Russian in mathematics papers is actually simpler than everyday Russian, because the sentence patterns are relatively fixed. Once you've memorized the technical terms, even grammatical errors won't stop you from understanding the core content."

Old Wang looked incredulous. "Why did you teach yourself Russian? What normal person would go and learn that?"

"Because I'm rather interested in the Soviet Union."

The four of them looked at Qi Hao with complicated expressions.

Old Wang leaned forward, lowered his voice, and spoke in the tone of a man who had been there. "Qi Hao, tell your teacher the truth."

"Are you after those Russian girls?"

"..."

"Professor Wang!" The mathematics dean raised his voice.

"No, no, hear me out." Old Wang began explaining with a perfectly serious expression. "I had a senior fellow student back then who also said he was interested in the Soviet Union. And what happened? He got himself a pen pal at Moscow University, a woman. Later, he ran off to Russia and hasn't come back to this day."

"You're not planning the same thing, are you?"

The corner of Qi Hao's mouth twitched. "Teacher Wang, I'm a freshman. I'm only eighteen."

"What's wrong with being eighteen? Can't an eighteen-year-old like Russian girls? It's reasonable, legal, and aboveboard."

"Professor Wang!" This time it was the president who spoke. "Can you be serious?"

"I am serious." Old Wang spread his hands. "Think about it. An eighteen-year-old freshman teaches himself one of the hardest languages in the world, and even learns it well enough to read academic papers. You tell me, what's driving him?"

"Can academic passion alone sustain someone through gnawing away at Russian grammar? Impossible. There has to be another driving force."

"Teacher Wang is right," Qi Hao said.

Everyone looked at him again.

"What I'm actually interested in is the Soviet Union's achievements in mathematics, physics, and other fields. Looking at the twentieth century as a whole, those achievements were in no way inferior. Kolmogorov, Gelfand, Arnold, Pontryagin... pick any one of these people's academic achievements, and it's enough to amaze you."

"Many people only know their names, not their work, because a great many original papers were never translated and were published only in Russian in the Soviet Union's journals. I think that's a great pity."

"So I thought, rather than wait for someone else to translate them, I'd be better off learning Russian myself and reading the originals directly."

"And honestly, there's a very distinctive feeling to reading those old papers from the Soviet Union. Their writing style is completely different from the Western one. They don't strive for formal polish, but their derivations are extremely solid. Every step is a head-on calculation, with nothing flashy."

"I really like that style."

Having said his piece, Qi Hao fell silent again.

The office was quiet for several seconds.

Old Wang let out an exclamation.

"As expected, a dead white moonlight is the best white moonlight."

"As long as he isn't a Soviet fanboy."

The president glared at Old Wang, then reminded Qi Hao, "In that case, Qi Hao, find those five sources and bring them here."

Qi Hao's head ached. Now that he thought about it, there seemed to be one source he hadn't found...

Meanwhile.

Several guests who hadn't left were still sitting in the president's reception room.

"Is the president coming back?"

"No idea. From the look of things, he doesn't intend to come back."

"He's the first person to leave people from Institute 611 sitting off to the side."

"I just checked Big Eye. Apparently a freshman math major at their university committed fraud in an SCI paper. He's probably gone to deal with it."

"A freshman? Let me see."

"Engineer Tian, wouldn't that be a waste of your time?"

"We're just sitting here anyway. I might as well see how university students commit fraud these days."