Super God-Level Top Student

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Lotte Dugan said unconcernedly.

"As long as you're happy, I'm heading back," Edward Witten said, pressing down his concerns, not wishing to say more.

Because he knew that what Lotte Dugan said wasn't wrong; it didn't concern him much.

"Goodbye, Professor Witten."

"Goodbye, Professor Dugan."

...

The esteemed professors from Princeton might see the matter as none of their concern.

But it was clearly not the case for Langley.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

This was probably what Romand Willi was feeling at the moment.

The spokesperson from the White House had already released the good news that the self-researched material model software was about to go live, and now the pressure was on Langley.

But it wasn't all on Langley.

After he reported, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy took over some of the work.

More materials scientists and computer scientists were involved in testing the material model.

To their relief, the results now appeared to be quite good.

Especially after the expansion of the database, the material model's reverse deduction of data showed a qualitative improvement. The accuracy had begun to approach eighty percent, and the error rate had also started to decrease.

The bad news was, even though many computer scientists and algorithm experts had joined the research on the material model itself, even beginning to reverse engineer it, they still couldn't figure out the core code of this invaluable software.

Not to mention creating something nearly as effective; any careless adjustment to some details could lead to a cascade of errors, utterly baffling the researchers.

Apart from not being able to adjust the software at will, and still not understanding its operational mechanisms, the software was performing very well in all other aspects.

It was even performing better than initially estimated, to the point of raising caution.

If the test version could do this, how powerful was the official version that Huaxia was using?

Combined with the fact that Huaxia was vigorously encouraging civilian computational construction through policy measures and had launched Photolithography Factories, it increased the burden on the decision-makers.

Was there a need to adjust the policy?

Should restrictions previously set begin to be lifted gradually?

How to continue maintaining the domestic technological advantage?

Really, these issues were rather complex.

After all, Huaxia was the world's largest emerging market with a population base of 1.4 billion, roughly equivalent to that of North America and Europe combined.

Hesitating now meant voluntarily giving up on such a vast market.

Simultaneously, such a huge market, when combined with its strong industrial capacity, would have a domino effect once it achieved technological superiority, which would be fatal for an empire already accustomed to winning.

At this moment, the ability to finely tune policy became crucial.

To maintain a leading edge for a longer period without sacrificing a huge market required comprehensive intelligence. Products needed to be parsed finely to tailor more precise policies.

Unfortunately, this was the year 2024, an election year.

Only the last crucial half-year remained to determine who would call the shots in the White House.

At such a time, votes were what mattered most.

And the vast majority of those with voting rights didn't care about the so-called restrictions. They didn't even care about where the myriad of products in the supermarket came from or how they were priced. What they needed was for their US dollars to buy as much as possible and for their retirement funds in the stock market to keep growing, ensuring a worry-free retirement.

Indeed, ordinary people did not concern themselves with how a one-dollar chicken was made possible, but they needed a dollar to actually buy that chicken. Similarly, people didn't understand the logic behind the continuously rising stock market nor could they grasp the complexity of the economic and technological policies.

But they could understand whether their stock prices were rising or falling, and they could clearly see whether the numbers in their retirement accounts were increasing or decreasing.

To paraphrase a particularly sport-loving former president during his campaign: "It's the economy, stupid, the economy."

Clearly, nobody was being stupid now.

When the stock market's lackluster performance became a focal point of the opponents' criticism, how to quickly boost capital confidence had become an immediate top priority for the leaders.

The importance of this even surpassed that of the ASML CEO Wenningke, who had repeatedly made dissatisfied remarks on the sales policy in public.

After all, a vast base of voters did not care what a distant high-tech CEO said; what mattered to them was when their retirement funds in their stock market accounts could grow to provide enough US dollars to pay off those bills mailed by banks.

Thus, a grand spectacle aimed at rekindling the confidence of capital became one of the options, even a necessary choice...

...

"We need wider-scale testing. But to test on a larger scale, we need sufficient authority, like connecting to the network," he said.

"Fine, Romand, you know I don't want to hear these clichés. I've just met the science advisor and reviewed the comprehensive report. I care even less about how the software was obtained. I only know that it indeed works and that it won't affect our cyber security, right?" he said.

According to the report, that seemed to be the case. But he felt that their experts might have faced some pressure. Most importantly, they hadn't thoroughly analyzed the software yet. That was his main concern. Maybe they needed to give their experts more time.

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