188: Chapter 188 Next time, I won't respond. I don't have time to deal with idiots!

Li Yan felt as if she had been struck by lightning. Her eyes widened instantly, and her hands subconsciously pressed against Zhao Yang's chest, instinctively wanting to push him away.

Reason screamed in her mind, reminding her that there was an uncrossable gap in their status and a moral boundary between them.

She was the Counselor, and he was her student.

But her weak resistance lasted only two seconds.

Amidst Zhao Yang's burning kiss, all the strength in Li Yan's body was quickly drained. The hands pressed against Zhao Yang's chest slowly lost their strength to push him away.

She closed her eyes, abandoning all rational resistance.

Zhao Yang increased the pressure of his hands, his left hand pulling her waist tighter, his right hand pressing against the back of her head, deepening the kiss.

The surrounding air seemed to have stopped flowing. After kissing deeply for a while, the two slowly pulled apart.

But Li Yan's body still hadn't recovered its strength. She could only lean in Zhao Yang's arms, her chest heaving violently, her head feeling dizzy and muddled.

"What's wrong? Is the Counselor enjoying this?"

Zhao Yang looked at the person in his arms, the corners of his mouth curling up slightly as he spoke slowly.

Hearing Zhao Yang's words, Li Yan was struck as if by lightning once again.

Zhao Yang's use of the word "Counselor" instantly pulled her back to reality.

Li Yan's face turned pale instantly. She didn't know where the strength came from, but she shoved Zhao Yang away and took two steps back.

"I... I'll go first."

Li Yan's heart was in chaos, her voice trembling. She didn't even dare to look up into Zhao Yang's eyes, turning and fleeing the scene in a panic along the way she had come.

She was the Counselor, and Zhao Yang was her student, at least in name. Now, Zhao Yang was a young scientist with a limitless future.

If a scandal about their conduct were to spread at this time, it would be a huge blow to his academic reputation and future.

She absolutely could not let such a thing happen.

Zhao Yang stood where he was, watching Li Yan's slightly stumbling figure disappear around the corner. There was no visible change in his expression.

Li Yan ran all the way back to her room, locked the door, and leaned against the door panel, gasping for air. After the fear faded, everything that had just happened was simply too crazy, making her heartbeat impossible to calm down for a long time.

The next day's mountain hiking trip proceeded as planned. The group climbed along the mountain road, students in groups of three or five. Zhao Yang walked in the middle of the group, and Li Yan led from the front.

Throughout the day, the two kept their distance, their gazes never meeting, and they didn't say a single word to each other. On Sunday afternoon, the bus carried the exhausted students back to Beijing Forestry University.

The next day, Monday.

The official American NIPS website updated the latest list of accepted papers and preprint links.

Zhao Yang's paper, "A Novel Asynchronous Distributed Framework for Ultra-Large-Scale Neural Network Training," was prominently listed and officially marked with a special tag for Best Paper candidate.

Soon, the academic network both domestically and abroad completely exploded.

Because of the Twitter leak by NIPS editor Charles last week, many people had been watching the NIPS official website updates all weekend. Therefore, as soon as the paper was published, it was quickly spread back to the country, spreading at an extremely fast speed.

On major university BBS, the forum that preceded Zhihu, and major IT technical communities, countless people began to discuss it frantically.

"It really got published! Come to think of it, how did Zhao Yang do it? Can he clone himself? I can barely understand the TIP paper and that twin prime conjecture. But how long has it been! He solved another deep-level learning problem? And this thing should require a massive amount of test experiments, right! I really find it a bit hard to believe!"

"As a low-level algorithm engineer at a big tech company, let me say a fair word. The mathematical model in this paper is very advanced, but the most outrageous part is the engineering implementation. To deploy this dynamic timestamp algorithm in asynchronous nodes, just writing the code and debugging it would take a five-person senior team at least a month. He did it all by himself in such a short time??"

"I seriously suspect that this paper is the collective achievement of some national-level laboratory in the country, and to create a god, they intentionally attributed it to Zhao Yang alone. Although the computational model is very strong, it is absolutely impossible to have been completed by one person independently."

"To the person above, is it that hard to admit that someone else is a genius? Every line of deduction in the paper carries a very strong personal mathematical style. That approach of using algebraic geometry to perform dimensionality reduction strikes is identical to the proof logic of the twin prime conjecture. Even if someone wanted to ghostwrite it, they couldn't imitate this kind of thinking."

Online public opinion showed a serious split. Most people were amazed at the quality of the paper itself, but held strong skeptical attitudes regarding its production speed and whether it was completed independently.

Facing this fermentation of public opinion that had begun to affect the evaluation of academic integrity, Beijing Forestry University and the Peking University School of Mathematics jointly announced on Tuesday morning that they would hold an emergency press conference at 2:00 PM.

2:00 PM.

The Peking University press conference hall was packed with media reporters. Zhou Limin and Academician Wang Wenyuan sat on the stage.

Zhao Yang, wearing a simple black jacket, walked to the podium.

He did not take the PR speech prepared by the school, nor did he say any polite pleasantries. He directly connected the laptop he brought to the press conference hall's projector.

On the huge screen, the terminal interface of the Linux system appeared.

"Regarding the online doubts about the production time of my paper, I will only respond once."

Zhao Yang held the mouse and opened the local code project folder.

He pulled up the submission records of the Git version control.

The screen clearly displayed the creation time, modification time, and final save time for every piece of core code. All records were precise to the second and completely conformed to the logical trajectory of single-line operation, without any traces of multi-person collaboration.

Then, he opened the local run log file.

"This is the local run log of the final experimental data. The operating device is the desktop in my personal apartment, with an i7-975 processor and dual GTX 295 graphics cards for parallel computing. The log shows that the total time for ten thousand iterations was eight minutes and twenty-four seconds. The timestamp is last Thursday night."

Zhao Yang scrolled through all the underlying experimental logs and system hardware call records, displaying them without reservation in front of all the cameras.

Data is the coldest, but also the truest. These logs, which carry system-level timestamps and hardware identification codes, simply cannot be perfectly forged in a short time.

After the demonstration, Zhao Yang unplugged the video cable and closed the laptop.

He raised his head, his gaze sweeping over the reporters below the stage.

"Just because you don't understand the world of geniuses doesn't mean geniuses can't do these things."

Zhao Yang stated a fact in a flat tone.

"This is the last time I will respond to doubts like academic fraud. From now on, no matter who questions me online, I will not respond. I don't have that much time to deal with idiots."

After saying this, he couldn't be bothered to continue explaining or accept questions. He picked up his computer, turned around, and left the press conference scene directly through the side door.