Chapter 56 The Finals: Her Father Was Released from Prison
Ye Yuying still has the ability to challenge for a place in the top ten of her grade and win a gold medal, but she is forced to consciously succumb to despair under duress. Nothing is more cruel than this torment for a proud soul.
In front of the Cheng family, she acted as usual. Her homeroom teacher had long been disappointed with her grades and couldn't get through to Cheng Mingdu on the phone in China. As time went on, the teacher also began to let her do as she pleased.
Three months before Cheng Mingdu's final, she sent her last message of blessing, and then fell completely silent, as if she had given up her survival instinct.
By the time the winter break of her third year of junior high school arrived, she had completely become Ge Jie's lackey.
With Cheng Mingdu's World Championship approaching, if Cheng Mingdu wins a medal after the competition, they will completely sever ties.
Under this daily oppression, Ye Yuying often thought about resisting, but when she thought about the price of resistance, she dared not do it.
She could only continue to play the role of Ge Jie's most obedient and silent lapdog.
And so the days slipped into winter, in a suffocating, slow, agonizing torment.
On the day the first semester final exams of the third year of junior high school ended, Chengdu, a city usually known for its warmth, was hit by a rare heavy snowfall.
That afternoon after school, Ge Jie, as usual, threw her own schoolbag and the schoolbags of her two classmates to Ye Yuying without a second thought.
"Ye Yuying, take us to the school gate, then go to the milk tea shop on the corner and buy three cups of grass jelly and bring them over."
Ge Jie gave the order in an imperious manner, then walked ahead with her friends, laughing and joking, empty-handed, enjoying the "beautiful sight" of the provincial champion behind her carrying three heavy schoolbags like a humble servant.
Ye Yuying followed silently behind, her steps heavy and her eyes numb.
This has become her daily routine.
Ye Yuying did not resist, nor did she hesitate for a moment. She silently took the money, handed the schoolbag to them, and plunged into the bitter cold of the snowstorm outside.
Snowflakes hit her face, quickly melting into icy water droplets that slid down her already frostbitten, purple cheeks.
She hunched her shoulders and stumbled along the street corner in the biting cold wind.
Ge Jie and the others waited for her at the alley entrance, chatting and laughing, to buy herbal jelly.
Amidst laughter and playful banter, a figure slowly emerged from the alley.
Ge Jie immediately snapped, seizing the opportunity to vent her anger: "You take this long just to buy some cheap milk tea? Are you trying to freeze us to death...?"
She originally wanted to give Ye Yuying a good scolding, but when she turned around, she instantly saw Ye Yuying walking out with a pale face, like a puppet on a string.
Ye Yuying's ponytail was tightly gripped by a rough and powerful hand, making her look like a lamb being choked and waiting to be slaughtered.
The one who controlled her was the man behind her.
The man's hands were rough and dark, with large knuckles, and the back of his hands was covered with crisscrossing, long-healed old knife wounds.
At this moment, the hand was like an iron clamp, tightly gripping Ye Yuying's ponytail at the back of her head. The fierce force forced her to tilt her head back, revealing a fragile and pale neck.
In front of this man, Ye Yuying's eyes did not tremble with fear, but rather showed a deathly, ashen despair.
Beneath the man's fierce appearance emanated a nauseating odor, which instantly choked Ge Jie and her companions to their throats.
It was a mixture of cheap tobacco, cheap alcohol, and a musty smell that lingered in dark corners, and even carried a faint, rusty, bloody odor.
His eyes were cloudy and bloodshot, hiding a wolf-like ferocity. On his head, there was an ugly scar that stretched from his temple to the top of his head, like a hideous centipede. His scalp there was bald, and no hair would ever grow back.
Ge Jie's curse caught in her throat.
"You little bastard, you think you're all grown up now? You buy things for others but don't even bother to give them to your father?"
"Your father is suffering terribly in prison, neither you nor your mother are going to get away."
Ye Jianguo spoke, his voice hoarse as if two pieces of sandpaper were rubbing against each other. He grabbed Ye Yuying's hair and pulled her forward, "You won some bullshit championship and you've already forgotten who your father is? Huh?"
"Tell me, who did you buy this for?"
Ye Yuying winced in pain, but gritted her teeth and remained silent, her eyes dark as she looked in Ge Jie's direction.
She spoke clearly in a completely calm tone:
"Buy it for them."
Her gaze pierced through the wind and snow, landing precisely on the group of girls not far away who were already frozen in fear.
In that instant, all the color drained from Ge Jie's face.
Following Ye Yuying's gaze, Ye Jianguo slowly turned his head away, like a wolf that had smelled blood.
His murky, fierce eyes slowly scanned Ge Jie and her followers.
That was no ordinary scrutiny.
It was the look in a butcher's eyes, full of greed and calculation, as he estimated the weight of livestock.
He looked them up and down, at their expensive down jackets, their brand-new designer sneakers, and at their faces, which, though pampered, were now pale with fear.
"Oh?" Ye Jianguo released his grip on Ye Yuying's hair, roughly shoved her aside, and then slowly walked towards Ge Jie and the others.
With each step he took, Ge Jie felt her heart skip a beat.
Ye Yuying's eyes were cold as she added, "They had quite a lot of cash on them."
The two girls next to Ge Jie were so frightened they were about to cry, their bodies trembling like leaves.
He paused, grinned, revealing a set of teeth stained yellow from smoking, his smile menacing and threatening.
"So, how should we calculate this?"
"Uncle... Uncle, I'm sorry, we were wrong... We were just joking with her..." Ge Jie's voice trembled uncontrollably, and her usual arrogant and domineering demeanor had completely vanished.
"A joke?" Ye Jianguo sneered. He suddenly reached out and grabbed Ge Jie by the collar of her designer down jacket, pulling her in front of him. "Do I look like I'm joking with you guys?"
"Ah—!" The two girls next to Ge Jie screamed in fright.
Ye Jianguo turned around and glared at them violently, "Shut the hell up! Hand over all your valuables, cash, cell phones, everything!"
Looking at her father's expression, Ye Yuying knew he wasn't standing up for her, but rather—
Robbery in broad daylight!
The three people were so frightened that they cried and quickly handed over all their money and cell phones, hoping to escape the devil's control as soon as possible.
Ye Jianguo took the item, casually weighed it in his hand, and a satisfied, greedy smile appeared on his face. He released Ge Jie's collar and pushed her away like throwing away trash.
"Get lost!" He spat on the snow. "If I see you guys again, it won't be so simple!"
Ge Jie and her companions felt as if they had been granted a pardon. They scrambled and stumbled into the snowstorm without looking back, disappearing in an instant.
The alleyway entrance instantly returned to deathly silence.
Ye Jianguo stuffed the stolen money and cell phone into the pocket of his greasy jacket, then turned around and walked back towards Ye Yuying, who had been standing motionless like a puppet the whole time.
He looked at her bloodless, numb face, his eyes devoid of any fatherly affection, only displaying a cold indifference and possessiveness as if she were his private property.
"Alright, you're not getting away." He grabbed her arm roughly again, with such force that he almost crushed her bones. "I'll catch your dead mother sooner or later! She'll come and keep you company then!"
"Come home with me!"
Without another word, he dragged Ye Yuying's frail body like a piece of luggage and shoved it into the dilapidated van that had appeared out of nowhere at the alley entrance.
The car door slammed shut, cutting off all the light.
Ye Yuying sat in the dark, musty-smelling carriage, listening to the roar of the engine. Through the dirty window, she watched the familiar street scenes rushing past.
She knew all along that the moment Ye Jianguo was released from prison, she would return to that original, fundamental hell.
However, before returning to hell, she incidentally used a real demon to scare away the little devil in the school.
Ge Jie's petty squabbles were nothing compared to Ye Jianguo's.
After all, her biological father was the real criminal.
The van bumped along the muddy country road, taking Ye Yuying away from Chengdu, a city that was both familiar and unfamiliar to her, and heading towards the gray, oppressive "home" of her childhood memories.
The car eventually stopped in front of a dilapidated self-built house with large sections of peeling paint. This was her "old home".
As soon as she pushed open the door, a nauseating stench of dampness, mold, cheap cigarettes and alcohol, and lingering sweat hit her, instantly enveloping her. The room was dimly lit, the furniture was old and worn, and bottles and cigarette butts were carelessly scattered on the floor.
This is her prison.
After obtaining the money he had stolen from Ge Jie and her group, Ye Jianguo quickly threw himself into daily gambling and drinking parties. Ye Yuying, on the other hand, became his personal, free slave.
She had to get up before dawn every day to prepare breakfast for Ye Jianguo, who was still hungover. She also had to wash mountains of smelly clothes and clean the house, which was like a garbage dump and could never be cleaned properly.
Her legs, once treasured by her coaches and used for running, are now soaked in cold, soapy water that smells of laundry detergent every day, or she kneels on the dirty floor, wiping away the stains with a rag again and again.
Her glory became his capital for showing off and a commodity for sale.
Ye Jianguo confiscated all the cash she had on her, along with her newly bought smartphone.
He would take her to his cronies' card games to show off.
"See that? My daughter, Ye Yuying, is the fastest girl in the whole province!" He would say while drinking cheap liquor, patting Ye Yuying's shoulder hard so hard it hurt her. "She's going to be an Olympic champion and make a lot of money!"
Men like him, with unfriendly faces, would stare at her with a mixture of surprise, greed, and ill intent.
Ye Yuying would stand silently in the corner, like an object being appraised, enduring all of this.
Almost all of her connections with the outside world were cut off.
The Cheng family must have known about her disappearance. Jiang Xinxue originally wanted to send this burden back to her hometown. Since Ye Jianguo had taken her away, Jiang Xinxue only needed to stay in the house and not come out to stay away from this despised husband forever.
During the day when Ye Jian went out to gamble, he would lock her inside the house and reinforce the doors and windows to prevent her from escaping.
She couldn't hear any sounds from the outside world. She closed her eyes and tried her best to recall the knowledge that remained in her mind.
She worried that over time, her brain would become rusty.
Cheng Mingdu is still waiting for her to hand in her answer to how to make a living, and her grandmother is still in her dream, telling her to run to a place with light.
*
Springtime, Lisbon, Portugal. The ICPC Global Finals.
In the stadium-like competition hall, there was a deathly silence, and on the huge electronic screen, the countdown was ticking away to zero second by second.
The only sounds in the air were the low hum of hundreds of computer cooling fans and the rapid, heavy tapping of keyboards being struck at an alarming speed.
140 top teams from various regions around the world, each with three members, are engaged in a five-hour-long mental marathon around a single computer.
The match has entered its final hour.
The huge electronic leaderboard on site has turned gray – the leaderboard has been shut down.
This is the most brutal and exciting rule of the ICPC: in the last hour, the solutions of all teams will no longer be made public, and the final winner will be a suspense until the awards ceremony.
Before the rankings were finalized, Cheng Mingdu's team was temporarily tied for first place with several other teams from top universities around the world, with a score of 9 questions.
At this moment, everyone's attention was focused on the "J problem" on the problem board, which was still gray and represented that no one had solved it—it was an extremely complex computational geometry problem.
(You can choose to skip the solution process; it will not affect the plot.)
Background: On a two-dimensional plane, there are N non-overlapping "residential areas" (N can be as high as 100,000) represented by simple polygons. Now, a technology company plans to launch M "communication satellites" (M can also be as high as 100,000), and the signal coverage of each satellite is a perfect circle.
The problem requires you to provide the vertex coordinates of all "habited areas" and the coordinates and signal radii of M satellites. The program should be able to quickly answer the following question: For each satellite, how many "habited areas" does its signal completely cover?
Both N and M are as high as 100,000. If the most inefficient method is used—for each satellite, traversing all N residential areas and performing a complex "complete coverage" determination—the total computational load would be M * N (i.e., 100,000 * 100,000 = 10 billion times).
The competition computer has a processing capacity of approximately 100 million operations per second, so the processing time is 100 seconds. However, this time far exceeds the 1-2 second time limit typically given for ICPC problems, and this solution lacks technical sophistication, defeating the purpose of the competition. Submitting this solution will almost certainly result in a "Time Limit Exceeded" (TLE) error, meaning the solution fails.
The difficulty of this problem lies not in the mathematical concepts, but in how to process large-scale data in a short time within the capabilities of a computer. This can only be addressed by optimizing the algorithm to efficiently complete the task within the limited computing power of the computer.
Cheng Mingdu's teammates have all stopped what they were doing.
Since conventional solutions often require thousands of lines of code, this is not a physical challenge; it is more effective to determine the approach before taking action.
"First of all, it's impossible to use such a time-complex method; it would take way too long." The teammate in charge of the project looked somewhat anxious, but their team's performance remained relatively stable.
As the team leader, Cheng Mingdu was the calmest of the three. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and unconsciously and rhythmically tapped his fingers on the table.
On his handsome face, there was no trace of tension, only an almost cold, absolute focus. He seemed to have detached himself from the noisy competition arena and entered a world of pure algorithms.
Suddenly, Cheng Mingdu's tapping fingers stopped. He opened his eyes, and in that instant, a dazzling, all-knowing light flashed in those usually deep and calm eyes.
He picked up the whiteboard marker and, at an astonishing speed, drew a series of auxiliary lines and geometric models on the small whiteboard next to him, constructing a completely new coordinate system that no one had expected.
“Let’s stop worrying about whether the plane is inside the circle,” his pen flew across the whiteboard. “The core of the problem is the ‘farthest point.’ We need to create a ‘query map’ to pre-divide the entire plane, instead of waiting for the query to come in and then calculating it.”
He first used the idea of "Voronoi diagram of the farthest point" to generate a map for each of the 100,000 "residential areas" to determine "who is the farthest from me".
He overlaid these 100,000 maps together to create an extremely complex "query map" containing an astronomical amount of information.
A query engine was built for this query map using the "planar point positioning algorithm".
Finally, when the problem provides the coordinates of M satellites, all they have to do is input the coordinates of each satellite one by one into the pre-built "query map".
The system will instantly tell him that for this satellite, the farthest point of residential area 1 is A, 2 is B, 3 is C, and so on. They only need to make a simple distance judgment to get the final answer.
In just a few dozen seconds, Cheng Mingdu clearly outlined this imaginative and magnificent algorithm framework on the whiteboard.
His two teammates, who were also top talents, quickly grasped the brilliance of this idea after the initial shock.
But then, the teammate in charge of coding immediately pointed out the most fatal, and also the most practical, problem in the plan.
"The idea is ingenious, but the implementation is extremely difficult!" His expression turned serious. "Just constructing the Voronoi diagram and calculating the intersections formed by perpendicular bisectors involves a large number of floating-point operations. The precision error of double is cumulative. If even one intersection deviates by only 10^7 due to precision issues, the entire topological relationship of the data structure will be wrong, and all subsequent queries will yield garbage results. The test data for this problem must be designed in the most tricky way to ensure our precision."
This is the "devil" in computational geometry competitions—the precision problem. It's like a ghost, capable of making you unable to write acceptable code even when you have the most correct approach in the world.
However, Cheng Mingdu seemed to have anticipated this problem. His face showed no surprise.
He picked up the whiteboard eraser, wiped away the auxiliary circle he had just drawn, and then looked at his two teammates, saying in an unusually calm tone:
“I know. So, we don’t need to use double.”
The teammate was stunned: "No need to double? Then how do we calculate the intersection and distance?"
"Using a geometry library template I previously encapsulated, we store all coordinate points using integers (long long). All core geometric judgments involving direction determination, which side of the line a point is on, and internal/external relationships are calculated using vector-based cross products and dot products. In this way, we can fundamentally avoid any floating-point comparisons throughout the entire mapping process, ensuring the correctness of all topological relationships."
"What about the distance?" the math teammate pressed. "The final step, determining the distance between the 'farthest point' and the center of the circle, requires taking the square root, which will inevitably produce a floating-point number."
“Yes,” Cheng Mingdu nodded, “but that was the only step we needed to take when using floating-point numbers. However, we didn’t need to actually take the square root; we used the square to make comparisons, which reduced the risk of precision errors.”
They are now using mathematics to bridge the gaps in the problem.
Cheng Mingdu was responsible for using his powerful spatial imagination to handle the most complex logic and boundary cases on the whiteboard.
The math teammate was responsible for transforming Cheng Mingdu's ideas into lines of rigorous mathematical derivations for the coding teammate to reference.
Time has come to the last minute.
"Submit." Cheng Mingdu's voice was now completely subdued.
For those who actually participate in this final, a problem can be solved cleverly, and they know the answer almost immediately upon receiving the result.
The teammate pressed the submit button. The eyes of the entire world were focused on their team's screen.
Rotate, wait, judge...
The moment the green "epted" sign, indicating "passed," lit up on the screen—
Thunderous applause and gasps of amazement erupted from the audience!
A staff member smiled, took a unique golden balloon representing "Problem J", walked to their seats, and tied it on.
Among the hundreds of colorful balloons in the stadium, this golden balloon stood out like a victor being crowned.
Cheng Mingdu's team successfully solved the most difficult problem of the entire competition in the last few seconds before the end of the game, almost securing the victory!
At the awards ceremony, the host, in a passionate voice, revealed the suspense of the last hour and finally shouted, "20XX ICPC Global Finals World Champion - Team 'Infinite Recursion' from MIT!" At that moment, Cheng Mingdu and his teammates, at less than twenty years old, stood together on the podium that belonged to the world's smartest minds.
...
That evening, in his hotel room after the awards ceremony, Cheng Mingdu had just finished celebrating with his team.
I was just about to check my emails and ask about Ye Yuying's recent situation.
Just then, his personal cell phone suddenly vibrated.
It's a domestic number belonging to a housekeeper.
He answered the phone.
Ye Yuying's father has been released from prison...
-----------------------
Author's note: 50~
If anyone has a better understanding of algorithms, please suggest better solutions. We can revise them later, since even genius protagonists are sometimes limited by their own understanding (I'm really ignorant QAQ). I can modify them again when I have a better understanding of these concepts...
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