Zeros and ones falling endlessly across the screen.
Seoha himself could not understand why such simple symbols so completely captivated him.
Open and closed.
Was it because, with only those two states, they could contain all the complexity of the world?
Mathematics dealt with infinity, but binary broke it down into the simplest possible pieces.
Negative and positive, absence and existence.
The world seemed to be made of an endless spectrum, but perhaps, in the end, everything was compressed into two symbols.
Duckie had good compatibility with the simple yet complex structure of binary.
This inconvenient system, devised to send signals to machines, he accepted as a natural language.
It whispered to him that, if he wanted, he could create a more perfect system.
“It’s fine. I’ll figure it out myself.”
It was a problem that could be easily solved by imposing a penalty on repeated cancellations. But Seoha did not like such a one-dimensional solution.
Tap, tap.
A scene Seoha had once witnessed in the laundry room surfaced in his mind.
“Did your experiment just end?”
“Yeah, the data kept coming out weird, so I kept going and it took forever.”
“You’re going to die at this rate. Hey! I saved a washing machine, okay? You use it first. I can do mine tomorrow.”
The students at this school would willingly give up their spots for friends who returned late because of experiments. Seoha did not want such kind students to receive penalties.
“Let’s make cancellations possible only once a day.”
That alone would significantly reduce the possibility of abuse. And he reworked the system so that rewards could only be received when a third party had actually benefited.
‘Still, just leaving the abusers alone feels a little…’
Seoha began designing a customized algorithm for them.
A smile spread across his lips.
The fact that mathematical theory could be applied to reality was unbearably fascinating.
“Done.”
New graphs and formulas appeared on the monitor one after another. A blue curve, different from the existing ones, had been drawn over them.
Now it was time to observe the situation under the changed conditions.
* * *
The patch led by Seoha had an immediate effect.
As abuse decreased and the laundry app began functioning properly, positive feedback started increasing among the students.
Now, the number of times baskets stretched all the way into the hallway or students got irritated while waiting for someone to take away their laundry had been greatly reduced.
In the Bit Forge clubroom,
the developers and the student council had gathered for a meeting.
Yeonu and Jungi, after reviewing the logs, wore satisfied expressions.
“The operating rate is way higher than last week. There are almost no complaints, either.”
“We’ve been getting a lot of thank-you messages at the student council too.”
Jungi and Dohyeon, liberated from complaint hell, looked relieved.
Even now, the anonymous board was full of voices praising “Quack Quack.”
Jonguk examined the graph closely.
The unfairness index, which had been marked in red, had eased significantly, and the green curve had stabilized smoothly.
“So this actually works. I was on the side that thought we needed to penalize reservation cancellations.”
Yeonu chuckled.
“It’s just laundry, at best. The return wasn’t big to begin with, and once farming got harder too, they had no choice. They quit the game.”
The patch targeting abusers would need more time before its effects could be seen. This was purely the result of restricting returns.
Seoha was surprised that a small change in a system could alter human behavior so drastically.
‘Perhaps humans are not rational beings so much as beings who simply try to satisfy their selfishness efficiently.’
If so, large platforms could easily control people by adjusting their systems.
Once that thought occurred to him, his heart grew a little heavy. Seoha decided to end the app development around this point.
“I think we can end the beta now.”
Everyone seemed to be thinking the same thing and nodded.
When Seoha closed his laptop, the noise in the clubroom subsided.
“You worked hard. Thanks to you, we were able to make a good app.”
Jungi stood up and offered Seoha a handshake.
“I’m the one who should be grateful. I got to learn programming.”
“When the results of the school project are announced, you’ll be able to officially confirm your performance score too.”
Jungi spoke firmly, looking at Seoha as if telling him not to worry.
“But what if another problem like this comes up? Seoha won’t be here anymore.”
Vice president Min Dohyeon still seemed worried.
But Seoha shook his head.
“You don’t need to worry. I added a conscience index to the algorithm.”
Everyone’s eyes widened at the news they were hearing for the first time.
“What is that?”
“I introduced an index that tracks who benefits when a cancellation occurs.
It’s a probability distribution function. In mathematics, it’s called Shannon Entropy. With this, we can filter out abuse with 99.9% accuracy.”
Seoha had decided that he would no longer leave room for human greed to interfere with the system.
“That’s possible?”
“Entropy, simply put, is a value that measures how evenly data is distributed.
For example, if dozens of people take turns receiving benefits, the entropy value comes out high. But if only three or four specific people benefit, the value drops sharply.”
As Seoha brought over a board and explained while drawing diagrams, Dohyeon finally understood.
“So if yielding doesn’t benefit a large number of people, the system detects it?”
Seoha nodded.
“Yes. And I excluded those who genuinely ought to receive consideration.
From now on, people who exploit the system will fall behind in priority. Conversely, if they follow the system properly, they’ll gradually recover, so it isn’t permanent.”
When on earth had he added such a complicated algorithm?
Everyone stared at Seoha with blank expressions.
“Um… Seoha!”
Yeonu started to speak, then hesitated.
He desperately wanted to recruit Seoha into Bit Forge, but he did not have the nerve to ask him to join them. There was already almost nothing left he could teach him.
“…Thanks!”
In the end, the words that came out of Yeonu’s mouth were a short, ordinary expression of gratitude. But Seoha read many emotions in his eyes.
Seoha smiled brightly.
“I had fun too. I can come hang out again next time, right?”
“Anytime!”
Their eyes were full of affection as they looked at Seoha.
Perhaps she had already grown attached, because Nari was sniffling with reddened eyes.
‘They’re good people.’
Seoha packed his things and stood.
He was satisfied that, through this project, he had met precious connections.
He was trudging back to the dormitory with his laptop when he saw a student walking on crutches.
Seoha recalled the list of students with laundry priority that Jungi had given him.
‘Senior Lee Jinju.’
He had heard that she had been in a serious accident when she was young.
Even now, she could not go anywhere without crutches.
“Senior.”
Seoha carefully approached and greeted her.
“Huh? Yu Seoha! I’ve met a celebrity.”
Though she was leaning on a crutch with one hand, her expression was bright and unshadowed.
“Would it be all right if I helped you?”
Seoha looked at her bag, which seemed heavy. But Jinju shook her head.
“Thanks, but I’m okay. The doctor said this leg will never recover for the rest of my life.”
“What?”
Seoha looked at her in surprise.
Jinju smiled calmly.
“It’ll be inconvenient, but I’ll have to live like this from now on too. So I shouldn’t get used to being helped, right?”
Seoha could not say anything.
“Still, thanks to you, things have gotten a lot easier.”
“In what way?”
“Quack Quack, I mean. Before, whenever I tried to do laundry, a few of my friends would show up. A long time ago, I fell and got hurt on my way to the laundry room, and I guess that weighed on them. Even when I said I didn’t want them to, my friends would force themselves to carry my basket or give up the washing machine for me.”
“Has that changed?”
“Yeah. Before, I felt so bad that I’d secretly get up at dawn to do it. But now, as long as I make a reservation, I can use it right away, so there’s no burden, and I can manage well enough on my own.”
‘Right away?’
Even if students with disabilities had high priority, they could not cancel existing reservations.
Most likely, there was still a friend who pressed cancel in time for her laundry slot.
“That’s a relief.”
“I just wanted to say thank you. I’m really glad you came to our school.”
She smiled broadly, waved, and slowly moved away toward the dormitory.
Seoha could not move from that spot for a while.
Friends who wanted to help a friend with an injured leg, and a student who felt sorry about that and deliberately got up at dawn to run the washing machine.
Jinju’s back as she walked bravely on her crutches, carrying a heavy bag, left a strong impression on Seoha. It felt as though the turmoil in his heart caused by the abusers had been purified.
‘I’m really glad you came to our school.’
It was merely a commonplace expression of thanks, but Seoha felt a sense of responsibility in her words.
He was happy that the algorithm he had made had made someone’s life even a little more convenient.
As soon as Seoha returned to his dorm room, he turned on his laptop.
On his desk were snacks and drinks the soccer team members had shared with him.
The cursor blinked on the screen.
“There must be people who need this too.”
When he typed “code sharing” into the search bar, countless results poured out. Seoha chose the name mentioned most often among them.
GitHub.
A place where anyone could upload their source code, and everyone could freely modify and develop it.
‘What should I name it?’
Seoha shifted his gaze to the duck figurine sitting on his desk.
A piece of himself that liked binary.
“All right. I’ll use you.”
Duckie.
After finishing the sign-up process, he uploaded the code.
In the description field, he wrote a short introduction.
[An algorithm for students’ fair use of laundry rooms, Quack Quack!]
[Return structure optimization, conscience index.]
[Anyone may refer to and improve it.]
Tap, tap.
Thousands of lines of code were committed.
The blue progress bar slowly filled, and then a completion mark appeared.
“Done.”
Seoha looked at his first project, now public on the screen, and smiled in satisfaction.
The next morning, Seoha rubbed his eyes and turned on his laptop.
“What is this?”
The number of messages in his GitHub notifications window was increasing endlessly.
[Stars (Bookmarks) ★ 1.2k]
[Forks 340]
[Issues (Discussions) 57 Open]
[Pull Requests (Suggestions) 23]
Overnight, a small project uploaded by an ordinary individual had found its way into the hands of developers all over the world.
Even the developer of a famous open-source project had starred Seoha’s account.
└Where is this place? What kind of school makes an app like this for laundry room reservations?
└I cried while reading the code. What was my ten-year career even for?
└Shouldn’t this be licensed?
└I was going to rewrite it in Rust, but after seeing the quality of the Python code, I quietly closed it.
└They used EF1 and Shannon Entropy for a laundry room lol
└They solved probability, optimization, fairness, and resource allocation all at once. This is seriously amazing, isn’t it?
Seoha’s code spread rapidly.
In just one day, overseas developer forums and social media gave it the nickname “the Quack Quack Algorithm,” and the name of the developer, Duckie, began to be mentioned along with it.