Algorithm system

appreciate?That’s right! Even for original code, the starting point is still: copy + paste.

The more code Lin Yuan wrote, the more he realized he couldn’t do without Ctrl C + V.

Lin Yuan’s peripheral vision caught sight of some people in the classroom carefully typing character by character on their laptop screens.

He couldn’t help but shake his head slightly, because with that way of writing, they wouldn’t just be staying for a late-night snack; they’d be eating breakfast there tomorrow too.

Neural networks involve a large number of matrix operations, and Lin Yuan got a headache just thinking about typing each character individually.

Writing code is essentially like building with blocks. When you’ve written enough code, you naturally come to realize this.

Lin Yuan also experienced this during the past six months of high-intensity training.

He remembered how, half a year ago, he used to type code as if he were typing English words.

Since it’s like building with blocks, it’s inevitable to reuse the same block parts. So, wouldn’t you have to copy + paste?

Therefore, originality and copy + paste are not contradictory at all.

Many people in this classroom still stumbled on the basic knowledge and understanding the problem.

—

Three hours passed quickly.

Lin Yuan’s antique T440’s fan was still whirring, but fortunately, the training result error was still slowly decreasing by units of 0.01%.

At this moment, Lin Yuan was both confident and a little uneasy.

Because he looked around and found that few people in the classroom had data training visible on their laptop screens.

This made him a little proud. However, his long-standing feeling of top universities being unattainable still left him feeling uneasy.

”Those who feel confident, take your notebooks to the first classroom on the east side and wait for the review,” Professor Zhang appeared again and dropped a very brief sentence.

Apparently, some candidates were very dissatisfied with this examination method. ”Professor, aren’t you being too hasty?”

Professor Zhang stopped upon hearing this. ”Student, trust me, you’ll thank me later. Because I helped you avoid wasting time on things you’re not interested in or not good at.” After saying that, Professor Zhang turned to leave.

”Professor, I’m going to complain about you.”

”Naughty child.” Professor Zhang ignored him and continued with his indifferent stride.

Lin Yuan naturally had to go for the review. However, his antique laptop’s battery health was too low; it would run out of power in minutes after unplugging it. Moreover, his laptop was currently running extremely power-intensive model training.

Lin Yuan was afraid that his laptop would die on the spot if he unplugged it, and then he would be done for.

And if he terminated the model training to save the data immediately, Lin Yuan was afraid that the training accuracy wouldn’t be high enough, which would affect his assessment ranking.

So, as Professor Zhang was about to step out of the classroom, Lin Yuan had no choice but to brace himself and say, ”Professor Zhang, wait.”

”Oh?” Professor Zhang looked back and then stopped. ”I remember you; your question in the conference hall was concise. Could it be that you also want to complain about me?”

Lin Yuan quickly explained, ”No, no, no, why would I complain about you? It’s just... I wanted to ask, are you an examiner?”

”Of course, I am one of the examiners.”

”It’s like this, my laptop is too old, and I’m running the training on the CPU. Can I participate in the interview session a little later?” Lin Yuan wanted the training to run for a better result, but he was also worried it would affect the subsequent interview.

”You...” Professor Zhang was a little surprised. ”Are you publicly asking an examiner to extend the exam time? Where do you get the courage to say that?”

Lin Yuan quickly explained, ”No, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is: my code is now sealed, and I’ve already committed it. I won’t change a single character; I just want my model to run a little longer. Look, the error rate is still steadily decreasing.”

”Commit” refers to submitting code.

Every code submission is recorded, and once committed, any changes Lin Yuan makes to the code would be obvious. This is basic knowledge for IT professionals.

Professor Zhang temporarily accepted Lin Yuan’s explanation and was also piqued by a hint of curiosity. ”Come, let me see.”

Professor Zhang then leaned closer to Lin Yuan’s laptop screen. ”The error descent is stable, without oscillation. But your computer is just too...”

Lin Yuan gave an embarrassed smile.

Perhaps Professor Zhang saw something from Lin Yuan’s attire, so he didn’t finish his sentence. Instead, he stood up and said softly, ”You continue here; I’ll send someone to call you later.”

The strict old man suddenly softened a lot. Without saying more to Lin Yuan, Professor Zhang’s figure quickly disappeared at the door.

The time that followed was a boring wait.

The speed of model training depended entirely on the machine’s performance. At this moment, Lin Yuan had nothing to do but stare blankly at his laptop.

He had initially thought he would need to explain more to Professor Zhang, but he didn’t expect the other party to agree to his request so readily.

Although committing code allows for code to be recorded, the commit must be submitted to the public network. Lin Yuan had specifically submitted his code to his own code repository on GitHub.

Because only by submitting to the public network can the commit record of the code be ensured to be secure and reliable. If it were only submitted locally, there would still be small tricks to modify the submission record. For example: secretly changing the laptop’s time to an earlier time, before the assessment end time.

Lin Yuan had originally planned to emphasize to Professor Zhang that he had submitted the code to GitHub, but the other party didn’t ask much.

Lin Yuan wouldn’t believe that a professor from a prestigious university’s computer science department wouldn’t know the intricacies of code commits.

Was it out of appreciation for him? But... they had only met twice.

Lin Yuan couldn’t worry about that much for now; his attention was entirely on the running records printed in the console. The lower the error rate, the higher the accuracy, and thus the higher the assessment ranking he would receive.

At first, Lin Yuan was worried that it would be his turn too soon, which would prevent his model training from reaching optimal results.

However, about ten minutes later, he started to worry again: Had Professor Zhang forgotten about him?

Was that casual agreement just now out of appreciation, or was it just a perfunctory reply?

Lin Yuan was a bit conflicted. After thinking for a moment, he decided to terminate the training, save the data, and go to the interview classroom to check.

—

The interview classroom was on the same floor, and Lin Yuan arrived quickly.

By estimation, about half the people were still left. Everyone was waiting at the door of this windowless, tightly closed classroom, like they were attending a graduation defense, waiting for their names to be called from inside.

Based on Lin Yuan’s experience attending graduation defenses, even at his ordinary alma mater, each defense would take about ten to twenty minutes. And with the current number of people present, if there was only one interview classroom, the time seemed a bit insufficient.

Soon, Lin Yuan’s concerns were dispelled.