Chapter 17 I'm in love with you, Stanford campus hacker Mara...
The Stanford campus hackathon, an annual tech extravaganza, saw dozens of teams gathered in a vast exhibition hall, the clatter of keyboards echoing, and the countdown ticking relentlessly on the central screen.
Shen Shutong's team, "Nova," was struggling. With less than six hours left to submit their final prototype, their core algorithm encountered a critical bottleneck: data processing speeds couldn't meet expectations, and demonstrations were plagued by frequent freezes.
"No, it's still too slow!" Teammate Li Ming scratched his head in frustration. "We've tried all the existing optimization methods, but the hardware's limits are here."
The team's mood was momentarily subdued. Was their ambitious project destined to fail over this technical detail?
Shen Shutong stared intently at the performance analysis chart on the screen, her eyes focused and not a bit flustered. "It's not the hardware's limitations; it's that our algorithm's efficiency needs improvement. Traditional parallel processing approaches have hit a bottleneck here. Perhaps we need to change our approach, such as..." She paused, her mind racing through some cutting-edge concepts she'd touched upon a few days ago with Fu Jingchuan. "Try an asymmetric distributed computing model?"
Another teammate, Wang Li, smiled bitterly: "It's a good idea, but that model is too complicated. It's impossible to realize it in a short time..."
"Not necessarily." Shen Shutong interrupted her, his fingers already flying on the keyboard, calling up several profound papers and open source code libraries. "I've read some related research, and there's a modified version of the framework that might be suitable for our project. Give me some time."
She was completely immersed in it, her eyes sharp as she quickly read, filtered, and integrated the information. The noisy environment around her seemed to be blocked out by her, leaving only the lines of code on the screen.
Not far away, Fu Jingchuan, the tournament's specially invited technical advisor, had just finished answering a team's questions. His gaze swept across the field, finally settling on Shen Shutong.
He saw her slightly furrowed brows and tightly pursed lips, and turned towards the "Nova" group.
"Are you in trouble?" He walked closer and his eyes fell on Shen Shutong's screen.
Li Ming seemed to have seen a savior and immediately started to explain the predicament.
After listening to this, Fu Jingchuan looked at Shen Shutong: "What do you think?"
Chen Shutong raised her head and met his gaze. "I think the key lies in the task scheduling strategy. The existing general strategies are too redundant. I need a more radical, customized scheduling solution that better suits the characteristics of our data." She drew a simple algorithm structure diagram on the whiteboard. "Look, if we introduce dynamic weight allocation here, we might be able to squeeze out every last bit of performance."
Fu Jingchuan looked at her sketch in amazement. Her ideas were not only correct, but even bolder and more ingenious than he had expected.
"The idea is correct, but the calculation of dynamic weights itself brings additional overhead," he pointed out, pointing to a node in the diagram. "Here, if we use a pre-computed hash table instead of real-time calculation, we can sacrifice a little accuracy in exchange for a significant performance improvement."
Shen Shutong's eyes suddenly lit up: "That's right! The loss of accuracy can be compensated in subsequent links through the error compensation mechanism! Fu Jingchuan, you are such a genius!" She almost jumped up with excitement, and her eyes looked at him as bright as stars.
Fu Jingchuan felt a little uncomfortable under her shining eyes and turned his eyes away slightly: "It's just basic operation." He took the keyboard next to her and said, "Here, the code can be refactored like this..."
He quickly typed a few lines of code, demonstrating an extremely efficient core snippet. Shen Shutong stared at the screen, his brain racing, drawing inferences from one instance: "I get it! Then the subsequent module connections can be adjusted like this..."
The two of them discussed, oblivious to the others, their thoughts colliding fiercely. A powerful gravitational field seemed to exist between them, and the other teammates could barely get a word in. They could only stare in amazement at the efficient collaboration between these two masters.
A seemingly unsolvable problem was actually solved clearly with just a few words and actions from them.
After the final plan was finalized, Shen Shutong immediately started to refactor the code, his fingers tapping out a dazzling rhythm on the keyboard.
Fu Jingchuan didn't leave. He silently pulled a chair over and sat diagonally behind her. He took out his laptop and began to work on his own affairs, his eyes occasionally glancing at her screen, watching her smooth and flowing code and extremely precise implementation.
Time passed by, and as night fell, many contestants in the exhibition hall were already exhausted, some even taking naps on their tables.
Shen Shutong was fully focused and finally typed the last line of code and ran the test!
The green success prompt lights up, and the performance analysis graph shows that the fluency has been greatly improved, perfectly meeting expectations!
"Success!" Li Ming and Wang Li exclaimed excitedly.
Shen Shutong let out a long sigh, her tense nerves suddenly relaxing, and a strong sense of fatigue immediately washed over her. Before she could share her joy, her eyelids became too heavy to lift. Her head tilted, and she fell into a deep sleep in the chair she sat in. A half-drunk energy drink was lying next to her.
Fu Jingchuan closed the computer, stood up and walked to her.
The air conditioning in the exhibition hall was also turned on very high. Fu Jingchuan looked down at the profile of Shen Shutong sleeping soundly, and there was still a hint of satisfaction at the corner of her mouth after her success.
He looked at her silently for a long time, his eyes softer than he himself had noticed.
Then, he carefully took off his thin coat, gently draped it over Shen Shutong's shoulders, and carefully gathered it together to prevent her from catching a cold.
A few hours later, Shen Shutong woke up in a warm feeling, and the first thing he smelled in his drowsy state was the mint scent on his coat.
She was startled for a moment, then suddenly realized what she was wearing. She looked up suddenly and met Fu Jingchuan's gaze. He had returned to his seat diagonally behind her without her noticing.
"Awake?" he asked. "Your presentation was a success. The judges gave it high praise."
Shen Shutong looked down at her coat, and a warm feeling slowly spread across her. She gathered her coat in her arms and said, "Thank you, Fu Jingchuan. Without you, we might have failed."
She paused and added, "And thank you for the coat."
Fu Jingchuan avoided her overly bright eyes, packed up his things and stood up: "It's just a piece of cake." He walked towards her and stretched out his hand.
Shen Shutong thought he was going to take back his coat and was about to take it off, but she saw that his target was the half-empty can of energy drink next to her.
He picked up the drink: "Don't drink this, it hurts your stomach."
After saying that, he took the can of drink and turned to walk towards the trash can.
Shen Shutong looked at his back, wrapped in his coat, the remaining body warmth and breath wrapped around her tightly. She suddenly felt that beneath this icy peak, there might be a scorching temperature hidden.
And she couldn't wait to explore more.
In the final presentation session, the "Nova" team won the championship with its outstanding project and Shen Shutong's highly infectious speech.
When the host announced the champion, "Nova," the audience erupted in applause. Shen Shutong stood at the center of the stage, radiant with confidence.
Fu Jingchuan stood at the edge of the crowd below the stage, his eyes following her closely, with unconcealable admiration in them.
Shen Shutong took the trophy, gave her acceptance speech, and her eyes found Fu Jingchuan in the audience. Under the gaze of everyone, she suddenly smiled slightly, walked off the stage with the trophy, and walked straight to Fu Jingchuan.
"Half of the credit for this championship is yours," she said loudly, her voice full of laughter.
Then, before Fu Jingchuan could react, she stood on tiptoe and quickly kissed him on the lips.
It was gentle and brief, but it instantly stirred up a thousand waves in Fu Jingchuan's heart and the people around him.
Time seemed to stand still. Fu Jingchuan froze in shock, his pupils shrinking slightly, and his ears turned red at a speed visible to the naked eye.
There was dead silence at first, and then there was a louder explosion of exclamations, whistles and applause!
Shen Shutong took a step back and looked at Fu Jingchuan who was completely frozen, smiling like a cunning and triumphant little fox.
"Fu Jingchuan, I like you."
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
