An Email from a Soviet!

Professor Alexei might now have been living in the American empire and moving among its elite universities, but stubborn Soviet blood still flowed in his veins, blood that would not tolerate a single grain of sand.

He was born in a science city in Siberia and grew up under the strict tutelage of the older generation of Soviet Union mathematical masters. In that era, scholarship was sacred and inviolable: right was right, wrong was wrong, and there was no room for even the slightest hollow compromise.

When Qi Hao's paper was under review, he had explained its value to the editor, who overruled Reviewer 1's opinion and accepted it.

And now someone was actually questioning the paper?

That meant they were questioning him!

There was another reason Professor Alexei could not hold himself back: Qi Hao had cited Soviet Union literature.

When the Soviet Union dissolved, the red empire came crashing down. In those chaotic years, Western academia not only chipped away at Soviet industry and the military-industrial complex, but also plundered the Soviet Union's vast and profound academic legacy.

For Alexei, a Soviet Union scholar who had lived through that era and later had no choice but to travel far away to the American empire to make a living, it was a pain that could never be erased.

But now someone still remembered Soviet Union scholarship and understood the greatness of Soviet Union literature. For that very reason, even if it defied convention, he had to speak up!

He was going to write an email to Rongcheng Radio and Television University!

This was an email from a person from the Soviet Union!

From a scholar who was still proud of Soviet mathematics!

He pulled the keyboard over and began to type.

To the academic committee of Rongcheng Radio and Television University:

I am Alexei Kozlov, a professor in the mathematics department at New York State University at Stony Brook. Recently, I noticed questions on the internet about the authenticity of the references cited in this paper. As someone who appreciates the paper, I believe it is necessary for me to speak up.

Of the five Soviet-era works cited by student Qi Hao, three came from the "Bulletin of the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences" and two from internal reports of Moscow State University's Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics. These publications were indeed not fully indexed in Western databases after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

After searching through multiple sources, I am providing electronic scans of the relevant documents as attachments (see attachments 1-5) for your academic committee to verify.

I must say frankly that I was very surprised when I saw this paper.

The Absolute Pruning Inequality constructed by student Qi Hao in the paper employs an exceptionally ingenious combinatorial extremal method. Rather than following the traditional route of probabilistic analysis, which has dominated almost the entire field of game-tree pruning efficiency analysis since Pearl, he returned to a purely combinatorial framework.

The significance of this result is that it proves, for the first time, the existence of an absolute efficiency bound for finite-state game trees that does not depend on probabilistic assumptions.

Over the past several decades, all theoretical results on alpha-beta pruning efficiency have depended on the assumption that node values are independent and identically distributed, an assumption that almost never holds in practical applications.

Qi Hao's inequality bypasses this assumption and proceeds directly from the combinatorial structure itself. This is a breakthrough at the methodological level.

What impressed me even more was how he used the Soviet Union literature. The extremal analysis methods he cited were not simply listed or paid tribute to; he incorporated them into his own proof framework. This shows that he genuinely understood the deeper ideas behind those works and could seamlessly connect them with modern theoretical tools.

For a first-year university student-if I have understood your China educational system correctly-to independently complete a work with originality in everything from the formulation of the problem to the techniques of proof is, in my experience, a sign of rare talent.

Mathematics is a discipline unconstrained by material conditions.

It requires no laboratory and no expensive equipment. It needs only a pen, a sheet of paper, and a mind capable of wandering freely through an abstract world.

For this very reason, mathematics is the purest arena of intellectual competition. In this arena, a person's age, status, and institution do not matter. All that matters is the power of the ideas themselves.

Student Qi Hao's paper made me happy, not only because it solved a meaningful problem, but also because it showed me that theoretical results quietly cultivated by a few people during the Soviet Union era had been rediscovered, understood, and developed half a century later by a young person on the other side of the globe.

This is the beauty of mathematics: it does not lose value with the passage of time, cease to be valid because of language barriers, or disappear because a country has ceased to exist.

If anyone still has doubts about the authenticity of the documents mentioned above, you are welcome to contact me directly at my work email address with your questions.

I will reply during working hours.

Alexei Ivanovich Kozlov

Professor, Department of Mathematics, New York State University at Stony Brook

Professor Alexei's email was posted in full, without a word missing, by the university's official Weibo account, complete with the original English and a Chinese translation. This was probably the most effort the account's operators had ever put into a post.

The United States professor's email excited the onlooking netizens.

@Rational Analysis Without Arguing: I take back what I said before. Frankly, a professor from a prestigious United States university, with no stake in this whatsoever, took the time to write such a long letter of his own accord and even attached the original documents. That act alone already says a lot.

A professor's academic reputation is his most valuable asset. He has no reason to put his career on the line to vouch for a student he's never met, unless this paper really impressed him.

@OnlookerNumberTwo: I think the person above nailed that analysis. Nice!

@TianyaRefugee: Wait, scroll back. Where are those accounts that were cursing the loudest before? Where did they all go? Weren't they jumping around just now? Come out and show yourselves!

@Academic Fraud Fighter V: [This Weibo post has been deleted by the user]

@Spectator Passing By: Hahahaha, the fraud fighter deleted his post and ran! Screenshots saved! This is a family heirloom!

@Little Prince of Mathematics: Uh... looks like I spoke a little too loudly before.

@Yanda University Math Senior Dog: You outsiders might not understand the weight of this letter, so let me translate. Scholars around the world working on game-tree search theory have all taken it for granted that node values are independent and identically distributed. Everyone's been going around in circles within that framework, and this first-year student just threw that assumption out and used a different method!

@Observer: Here's an analogy you can understand. Imagine everyone in the world was studying how to use matches better, when someone suddenly asked, "Who says we have to use matches?" Then he invented the lighter. Think about that. Really think about it.

Yet the matter was far from over.

The comments section was still heating up, and the hashtag #AmericanProfessorStronglySupportsRongchengRadioAndTelevisionUniversityStudentsPaper# had quietly climbed to fifth place on Weibo's trending list.

Just when everyone thought the matter had reached its climax, at 8:42 that evening.

A corporate account with blue-V verification appeared in the comments under the statement on Rongcheng Radio and Television University's official Weibo account.