Entropy was astonished.
He was taller than expected, so she hadn’t even considered that it might be Seoha.
“Yu Seoha?”
“That Four-Color Theorem guy?”
Both of their eyes went wide.
Entropy nodded.
“There’s no doubt. The problem we put out wasn’t that sloppy. He solved this without a single hint?
That’s impossible unless he’s a genius on that level.”
Only then did the two grasp the situation, and broad smiles spread across their faces.
“So it was true that he was coming to MIT.”
“I didn’t even know he was coming to our school.”
A big fish they hadn’t even dared hope for had come to them on his own.
Entropy approached the screen and examined the equations Seoha had written in detail.
They had planned to acknowledge the answer as correct as long as the values were roughly right. That was why they had left errors in the calculation process and phase discrepancies well within the margin of tolerance.
But the result Seoha had produced was different.
What he had written down wasn’t a roughly correct value, but a function that converged perfectly with the data.
“This is just monstrous. It’s way too accurate to call it intuition.”
Considering his clear time, it meant he had skipped over the delay term in one go. And after recognizing the phase rotation, the conclusion was that he hadn’t simply performed frequency-domain analysis, but reconstructed the phase space itself.
“Is that really such a big deal?”
Root, who was not a math major, couldn’t tell exactly what Entropy was so shocked by.
“To align a delay term without correction, you have to catch a phase discontinuity at least once in the complex frequency domain.
Usually, when the phase gets twisted in the FFT result, you need an unwrapping process, right? But he didn’t use that. He reconstructed it directly from the raw phase state.”
Cipher Fox asked from the side.
“When you say directly, how?”
“I’m not completely sure, but it was probably by backtracking the phase shift of the eigenoscillation function.
Even if you don’t know the exact form of the function, you can roughly ‘visualize’ the phase rotation just by looking at the flow of energy density and argument. I can’t believe he did that by hand, though.”
He frowned, as if trying to understand Entropy’s words.
“So, to sum it up, all that complicated signal filtering and Fourier transforming we were doing, he did in his head in real time.”
“It means we discovered an incredible mathematician, right? Now we just have to scout him properly.”
Root smacked his lips and stood up.
‘No, you guys don’t understand exactly what I mean. This is…’
It was a way of thinking possible only for someone who could see functions not as symbols, but as three-dimensional spaces right in front of their eyes.
“Now, let’s go welcome our badass mathematician!”
“Yeah, yeah! We can’t keep such an esteemed guest waiting too long.”
Root took out the graphics card he had bought as the first-place prize. He didn’t forget to pack souvenirs for 002 and 003, who had made it to the finals, either.
The three of them stepped out into the hallway.
The final stage was in the classroom right next door. With excitement in their hearts, they opened the classroom door.
‘Hm?’
002 was beating Seoha mercilessly with a beaver plush. 003 was behind him, choking him by the neck.
“How the hell did you do it?”
“Explain it to us too!”
“I told you. I just saw it.”
“You fraud!”
“That’s what we’re asking—how did you see it? I should’ve gone to Duke. I came to MIT and ended up meeting a lunatic like you.”
Backpack grabbed Seoha by the collar and shook him. Seoha, at a loss, made a gesture of surrender.
“Ahem!”
“Guys, let’s keep it moderate.”
“Ah! The hackers!”
“Seniors, is it okay for you to show yourselves like this?”
“You must not know because you’re freshmen, but MIT actually encourages hacking. As long as you follow the principles.”
“Principles?”
“Yeah. Don’t harm others, clean up after yourself, and above all, don’t get caught.”
“Oh! That sounds kind of cool.”
“Right? Pretty cool.”
“Now! 002 and 003, take these and go home. You can be proud! Making it this far is already more than good enough.”
Entropy held out coffee mugs made from beakers to Ellie and Backpack.
On the outside, instead of measurement marks, stress level percentages were printed.
The two accepted the cups and made sullen faces.
“My stress index is going up. I guess I do need this right away.”
“How did they even make the handle?”
Ellie tilted the cup this way and that, examining it as if appraising a jewel.
“This is a total must-have, okay? It’s a limited edition we made ourselves, so take good care of it.”
Root ushered the two of them out of the classroom.
“What about me?”
Seoha stood there blankly, looking at the hackers.
“We prepared something special for first place.”
Root brought over the beaver plush.
“This isn’t an ordinary plush. It’s got all kinds of devices inside. You can control it with your phone too.”
Beep—
When he pressed a button, the beaver moved its tail.
“You saw it earlier, right? You can make it talk with a program, and it has a gyro sensor inside, so it reacts to human movement. Of course, you can change it by coding it.”
Root handed him the plush.
“Wow! It’s cute.”
Seoha took the plush and examined it.
Every time it wagged its tail, a small servo motor whirred and vibrated.
“Now, to the main point…”
“Yes?”
‘Wasn’t the business already over?’
Seoha, who had been excited at the thought of going home and coding the beaver, widened his eyes.
“Where should I start? We were originally a club that hacked as a hobby. We have code names too… I’m Entropy.”
“I’m Root.”
“Cipher Fox.”
At Seoha’s puzzled expression, Entropy laughed loudly.
“Bear with us. We’re more used to being called by our codes.”
“Yes, it’s fascinating.”
“There are quite a few teams like this at MIT.
When people hear hacking team, they all think we’re illegally breaking into things, but it’s different here. Hacking is part of MIT’s identity.”
“Identity?”
“Yeah.”
Root picked up Seoha’s words.
“Hack to learn, learn to hack. This school believes the process of hacking itself is studying. That’s why we’re hackers, but we never harm others.”
Cipher Fox folded down a finger.
“There are officially eighteen registered hacking teams at MIT alone. Security research, robotics, cryptography, art, even social engineering—each team has completely different fields they like.”
It was an interesting story.
“What about you?”
The three of them looked at one another and grinned.
“We’re interested in game development.”
“Ah!”
Only then did he understand.
Today’s orientation had been no different from a game.
Cipher Fox opened a laptop and showed Seoha.
“Watch closely.”
Tap, tap.
Graphics appeared on the screen.
The Charles River, Killian Court, the Infinite Corridor.
Every structure of MIT had been delicately rendered as a 3D model.
“The player is a freshman. The NPCs include professors, researchers, TAs, and staff. We titled it ‘Surviving at MIT.’”
‘Is it a zombie apocalypse?’
It was a strange title.
“What kind of game is it?”
“You can do anything—study, found a startup, date. Since it’s modeled on a real space, violent stuff is out, though.”
“We want to use this as a foundation to make an even bigger open-world game later. But we ran into a problem.”
Cipher Fox frowned as if it were giving him a headache.
“What problem?”
“We can’t control the NPCs. For example, here.”
Entropy clicked on the library and zoomed in.
“The emotion algorithm got tangled. When fatigue reaches 100, they’re supposed to rest, but if that clashes with the diligence weight in that state, they go back to the library. It’s an infinite loop.”
“And then?”
“They sit there for twenty-four hours. Until every dissatisfaction value rises to MAX. Then they die.”
Looking at the log, it said the NPC in question had drunk thirty-seven cups of coffee today.
Root burst out laughing.
“That’s perfect realism. That’s an MIT student right there.”
“Don’t joke. I feel like my head’s going to explode.”
“I told you to scrap that damn emotion graph. Just let them react randomly enough.”
“Then immersion drops. I want NPCs that react like they’re truly real.”
Root and Entropy bickered as if this were familiar.
Seoha felt a strange sensation.
Every concern Entropy was having right now was a path Seoha had already walked.
“Excuse me!”
Their goal was different, but if he collaborated with them, he felt he could develop the Synapse Engine faster.
“Hm?”
“Actually, I was making something similar to this.”
Seoha took his laptop out of his bag.
Tap, tap.
A black canvas appeared on the laptop screen, and square buildings and dots were arranged one after another.
“What is this?”
The hackers came closer and examined the screen.
“Synapse. It’s an engine I made.
I viewed the school as a set of resources and set the students as agents. They move based on decision functions.”
Seoha explained to them how the Synapse Engine worked.
At first, they thought it was a simple demo code.
But the more Seoha continued his explanation, the more their expressions changed.
The dots moving between buildings collided with one another, gathered together with a certain probability, then scattered.
Cafeteria, classrooms, library.
In each space, the patterns of students gathering and dispersing felt alive.
“You said this was the school you attended, right? How much did it sync with reality?”
Seoha hesitated for a moment before answering.
“Toward the end, about 98%…
The spatial occupancy rate by time period, movement paths, even average dwell time all nearly matched.”
The three of them inhaled at the same time.
“My God. We poured half a year into ours and our NPCs only cause bugs…”
“You already made what we wanted, didn’t you? Could you apply this to MIT too?”
Seoha looked troubled.
“This is still experimental. It gets heavy once data piles up… MIT is so big that it probably won’t be manageable.”
Cipher Fox spoke urgently.
“That doesn’t matter! We’ll solve that! Please let us use this in our game.”
Entropy nodded.
“I think the same. Let’s put the Synapse Engine on our game. We can change the game’s name to ‘MIT Simulator’ too.”
They were only simple squares and dots, but the algorithm applied to them was tremendously precise.
She had no confidence that she could ever catch up to Seoha’s simulator.
Root began writing something on a piece of paper.
“Let’s not just talk. Let’s put it in writing.”
[In exchange for providing the Synapse Engine, 25% equity in the game will be transferred to Yu Seoha.]
“Anyone object?”
A full one-quarter share.
But no one raised an objection.
“With that engine, we can make a game on a whole different level.”
“Let’s write in revenue distribution, IP, and ethics clauses too.”
Entropy took the pen and began drafting the contract.
“Yu Seoha, we’ll make the game. You just need to provide the engine and help with optimization. What do you think?”
Seoha looked down at the contract.
The engine he had developed would become the heart of the game they were making.
It was an unexpected result, but Seoha wanted to see this game’s future too.
Seoha wrote his name on the contract.