Chapter 364: To the Backbone of a Great Nation

Shen Che nodded without speaking, waiting for Li Dong to continue.

Li Dong stared at the energy spectrum graph.

He quickly ran through the entire process in his head: the framework of the inversion operator, its condition number, its scaling in the statistically sparse region, and the new inequalities that would emerge after applying the Li Criterion.

“Teacher Shen, I have a rough idea. Just hear me out. Whether it’ll actually work is something we can hash out in detail after the team officially starts the project.”

Shen Che chuckled.

‘This kid really knows how to be tactful.’

“Just say it.”

Li Dong organized his thoughts before speaking.

“Here’s what I’m thinking.”

“For the inversion of that energy spectrum segment, we can first run it through the Li Criterion.”

“But instead of applying it uniformly across the whole spectrum, we should run it segment by segment, based on energy bands.”

“The lower energy bands are already stable because the criterion coefficient is low, so we don’t touch those.”

“But once we get past 10 TeV, the criterion coefficient will start climbing along with the energy bands.”

“As soon as it climbs into the anchor interval, we can just label that entire segment as a forbidden zone.”

“No matter what kind of flashy or strange structures pop up in this forbidden zone, we dismiss them all as non-physical conclusions.”

“For the remaining safe zones, we can then apply the Bayes plus Tikhonov method to meticulously extract the true structure.”

“This creates a two-pronged attack: the forbidden zone acts as a backstop on top, while our tools carefully extract data from below.”

“Theoretically, this should suppress more than half of the problems caused by the Illusion Peak.”

“But whether it’ll actually work, we won’t know until we run the data.”

After Li Dong finished, Shen Che was silent for about ten seconds.

Finally, he looked up, his expression somewhat complicated.

“Li Dong, this idea of yours—applying the criterion segment by segment along the energy bands… I can’t guarantee it will work right now.”

There was a hint of emotion in Shen Che’s voice.

“But this approach… no one on our team has ever dared to think this way before.”

“Everyone has been stuck in a fixed mindset. We either treat the criterion coefficient as a global threshold and apply it as a single yardstick, or we try to make it go head-to-head with the Tikhonov method.”

“No one ever thought of running it along the energy bands and then cordoning off the forbidden zones piece by piece.”

He gave Li Dong a deep look and managed to get a half-sentence out: “No wonder Yan University treats you like a treasure.”

Li Dong: “…”

After he finished speaking, Shen Che jotted down Li Dong’s suggestion in his notebook, then added a small line of text.

“First team meeting after project approval – To be discussed.”

「…」

「On this very day, August 29th, at ten in the morning.」

In a conference room inside an office building in the Capital City.

The high-level trade official from a certain Western country sat at one end of the long table, a long line of aides behind him.

Across from them sat several of Huaxia’s representatives.

The tea on the table had already been refreshed three times. The atmosphere in the conference room was terribly oppressive.

The trade official had been sitting for nearly an hour.

‘His original plan was to press them a bit more on the list of demands, apply some verbal pressure, and then, taking advantage of any emotional fluctuations on the Huaxia side, get the letter of intent signed.’

But he had underestimated the patience of the people across from him.

Ever since they had sat down, the lead representative across the table had offered only one, unchanging response.

“We understand your demands.”

“Our side’s position has already been expressed.”

“As for the specific letter of intent, we do not feel now is the time to sign it.”

He was starting to feel a little agitated.

He couldn’t help but push the list of demands toward the center of the table again.

“I hope the Huaxia side will seriously reconsider our sincerity.”

“Especially regarding the second article.”

“As a reciprocal condition…”

Before he could finish…

…the phone in his pocket—the one his secretary had repeatedly and sternly warned him to “put on silent”—suddenly vibrated.

Normally, he wouldn’t have looked.

But the representative across from him had just finished speaking, and there was a brief pause at the main table.

He subconsciously glanced at his phone screen.

A breaking news alert from a financial media outlet in his own country had popped up on the screen.

It was an incredibly short line of text.

He finished reading that line of text.

And he simply froze on the spot.

The arrogant smile vanished from his face in an instant.

「…」

「At almost the exact same moment.」

Two new topics shot to the top of the domestic Weibo Hot Search list.

[#National Power Equipment’s Qiming Series 28nm Immersion Lithography Machine Mass Production Line Launched#]

[#Hua Wei’s Xinghe Platform First Commercial Use#]

The source of the first trending topic was a brief announcement of less than 200 words that had suddenly been posted on the National Power Equipment Group’s official website.

“Progress Report on the Launch of the Group’s “Qiming” Series 28nm Immersion Lithography Complete Machine Mass Production Line”

[The “Qiming” series 28nm immersion lithography complete machine, a key long-term project for National Power Equipment Group, has undergone multiple rounds of engineering iterations since its inception.]

[The Group’s mass production line for the complete machine, located at an undisclosed site in East China, has officially rolled out its first batch of qualified units this month.]

[Core subsystems—including the immersion projection lens, dual wafer stage, real-time thermal-fluid coupling control module, and ultra-pure water circulation system—have all met key internal design specifications.]

Appended to this were several hard metrics that would make anyone in the industry do a double take.

Finally, there was a paragraph that mentioned a person’s name.

[The Group extends special thanks to the joint high-performance computing and low-level algorithm research team, led by Professor Gao Wen—an academician of the Huaxia Engineering Academy and director of the Peng City Laboratory—for their crucial support in the engineering and deployment of the core real-time thermal-fluid coupling control algorithm.]

[Moving forward, the Group will leverage the existing mass production line to continue pushing R&D toward complete machines for more advanced process nodes.]