Elder brother's garrison

Page 1862

Cleveland carefully placed Little White's feet on the beach.

"Phew... It feels so reassuring to stand on solid ground," Xiaobai exclaimed.

"Xiaobai! How did it go!" Nia and the ship girls stepped forward and asked Xiaobai with concern, "Xiaobai, are you confident about the problem with that construction device?"

"Um... I can only say, absolutely not." Xiaobai scratched his head and smiled sheepishly at Nia.

"It's okay! Xiaobai, you're very smart! I believe that as long as you work hard, you'll definitely be able to solve these problems and get the research ship girl!" Nia quickly encouraged Xiaobai, her face full of seriousness.

"Nia, you really have faith in me..." Xiaobai exclaimed.

“Because you’ve always been omnipotent in my heart, Xiaobai!” Nia said again.

“…If only I were truly omnipotent…” Xiaobai smiled at Nia, then looked back at the admirals engrossed in solving puzzles on the beach. After letting out a long sigh, she said to Nia, “Nia, let’s go back.”

"Huh? So fast? Should we go buy a test paper?"

"No need, I've already memorized all those questions."

"Xiaobai, you're amazing!" Nia exclaimed with admiration. "Then it shouldn't be long before you solve the problem too!"

“…Haha.” Xiaobai scratched his head and gave Nia a wry smile.

Just as Xiaobai and Nia were talking about this, suddenly, a few sarcastic laughs came from the side.

"Hehe, I've already memorized those questions. You're not far from solving them." A bespectacled admiral with a messy, bird's-nest hairstyle repeated Xiaobai and Nia's words in a strange tone. After repeating them, he snorted disdainfully, not caring at all about his own voice. "Such a newborn calf is not afraid of a tiger. All sorts of cats and dogs are starting to show off..."

"Haha... Just looking at the questions on the exam paper makes my head spin, and this guy can memorize them after only one glance at the sea? With that kind of ability, what kind of admiral is he?" Another admiral nearby, biting his pencil, started grumbling. "That's enough, go home and stop showing off!"

"Do you really think this is a high school or college math problem? I'm a math master's student. I guarantee you, even if you called all the math gurus from my university, they might not be able to solve it!"

"Don't be like that, who is he? He can memorize all the questions just by taking a look, haha!"

"..."

The admirals who were solving problems near Xiaobai and Nia seemed to be extremely dissatisfied with the conversation they had just had and began to laugh at them.

As Nia listened to the words of the admirals around her, her breathing became rapid. She stomped her foot and glared angrily at the admirals around her.

"Xiaobai is really amazing! You guys..."

Nia was halfway through her sentence when she suddenly felt a warm hand pulling her back.

Nia looked at Xiaobai, only to see Xiaobai smiling at her and shaking its head.

Xiao Bai smiled and walked up to the admiral who had just finished the first game with his messy hair, and slowly squatted down.

"What are you doing?" The admiral with the messy hair stared at Xiaobai warily. "What? Going to hit someone?"

"..." Xiao Bai just smiled and squatted down, glancing at the test paper in his hand, then pointed to one of the questions.

That question was the very one that the "chicken coop hairstyle" admiral was racking his brains to answer.

"What are you doing? You're not going to say you know how to solve this problem, are you?" the admiral with the messy hair said disdainfully.

"...Of course I don't." Xiaobai smiled without changing his expression, but his finger pointed to a letter on the question. "But this part of the question seems to be wrong. The question on your test paper says b+1, but the real question should be (b+1) squared."

"...Are you crazy?" The admiral with the messy hair immediately turned pale.

"If you want to know if what I said is right or wrong, you can go and see for yourself at the construction site." Xiaobai shook her head, stood up without getting angry at all, and left with Nia and the ship girls who were glaring angrily at the admiral around them.

Soon, Xiaobai and his group disappeared from the sight of the surrounding admirals.

"Haha, this little girl is so stubborn! To cover up her lie about memorizing the questions, she deliberately said that our questions were wrong, haha!"

"I really can't learn that confident demeanor."

"Goodness, looking at her confident back as she turned around, anyone who didn't know better would really think she was right."

The surrounding admirals immediately began to laugh mercilessly.

Chapter 2582 A Fatal Mistake

"Everyone on the beach knows that this question was jointly copied by several admirals ranked in the top 50 in the world. Many admirals on the beach have helped to check and verify it, so its accuracy is guaranteed. If this question is wrong, I'll twist your head off on the spot and use it as a football!"

"Does this brat mean that all of us, hundreds of eyes, are blind?"

"Forget it, forget it. The girl is just shy. She was just putting on a brave face after being scolded a few times. You see, she knows she's in the wrong and ran away. Let's not bother with her."

Even though Xiaobai and his group had left everyone's sight, the admirals around where Xiaobai had been were still talking about it.

However, after Xiaobai left, the Chicken-Headed Admiral kept frowning and remained silent.

Just then, another admiral wearing glasses patted him on the shoulder next to the admiral with the messy hair.

"Alright, Lao Fang, don't be angry. That young girl is just being immature." The admiral said to the admiral with the messy hair, "You've been working tirelessly on this set of questions lately, and we all know how much effort you've put in. It's understandable that you got angry when you suddenly heard someone belittling this set of questions."

The admiral with the messy hair and the admiral with glasses are friends. When the admiral with glasses speaks, the admirals around them all agree.

"That's right. When Lao Fang was in college, he won several national math Olympiad awards."

"He worked day and night, checking and calculating like crazy, piling up calculation sheets all over the office. He even lost over forty pounds. He knows better than any of us how valuable these problems are. Anyone who insults these problems is essentially negating his lifelong hobby."

As the surrounding admirals talked, they all comforted the admiral with the messy hair.

"Hey, Lao Fang wasn't always this easily angered. He just really enjoys being looked down upon and couldn't hold it in anymore."

"Don't even mention Lao Fang being angry, I'm angry just watching from the sidelines!"

"What she meant was that there's definitely a clown on one side between us and them!"

"Old Fang, don't take it to heart."

"What b+1 squared? I think that's just nonsense! Ignore it! Let's do our own thing!"

"..."

The admiral with the messy hair listened silently to the words of comfort from his friends around him. His furrowed brows slowly relaxed, and he nodded to them.

"...I just lost control of my emotions a bit." The admiral with the messy hair sighed, rubbing his forehead and looking down at the problem in his hand. "This problem is really difficult. The amount of calculation involved and the complexity of the formula derivation are definitely not something that can be easily solved in a short period of time... What's more, there is a particularly tedious derivation in this problem..."

"Stop talking, stop talking, we all understand."

"Let's get back to the problems. These overpowered research ship girls are really hard to get..."

The admirals around him chatted amongst themselves, then lowered their heads and focused their attention back on the exam papers in their hands, as if the incident had never happened.

The admiral with the messy hair scratched his head hard, suppressing the chaotic emotions in his heart, and let out a long sigh.

The admiral with the messy hair picked up the calculation paper beside him, glanced at the complicated and tedious reasoning process on the paper, then shook his head and angrily crumpled the calculation paper into a ball.

"What's wrong? Did the calculation fail again?" asked the bespectacled admiral next to the man with the messy hair.

"Hmm, I still can't figure this out." The admiral with the messy hair nodded. He hesitated for a moment, then unfolded the crumpled paper and showed it to his friend. "The direction of the formula derivation for this position is correct, but this method is just too complicated. I've tried other derivation methods several times, but I've always hit a dead end in the calculations..."

"The question can't actually be wrong, right?" the bespectacled admiral laughed.

"Don't joke around, it's impossible for it to be copied incorrectly." The admiral with the messy hair frowned, looking somewhat displeased. "My parents are both math teachers. I learned advanced math before I could walk. I've done more math problems than I've eaten meals. Do you think my advanced math intuition developed over the past thirty years is a joke? If someone really copied the problem incorrectly, the calculation process would definitely feel very awkward. There's no way I wouldn't notice it."

"Haha, you're right, you're right, sorry, sorry." The bespectacled admiral gave an awkward laugh.

"...Alas, it's my incompetence." The admiral with the messy hair lowered his head dejectedly.

"No, if you're not capable enough, then what about us?" The admirals on the side began to mock themselves.

The admiral with the messy hair had no mood to refute the words of the admirals around him. He just looked helplessly at his calculation results on the verification paper, his brows furrowed.

"What exactly happened... Could it be a problem with the application of the intermediate formula... Let's work backwards to see where the calculation went wrong."

The admiral with the messy hair muttered to himself. He pointed at the calculation paper, staring at a line of data that had reached a dead end. Then he worked backward from the calculation formulas, looking up layer by layer.

The calculation process was meticulous and flawless, and no errors or omissions were found as expected.

"That's not wrong either..."

The chicken-headed admiral muttered to himself, feeling rather annoyed.

However, at the very end, when the Chicken-Headed Admiral was working his way back through the data and finally saw the source of this dead-end data, he froze on the spot.

The source of the data... just happened to be "b+1" which the white-haired female admiral had pointed out earlier.

what happened……

Is it a coincidence?

The admiral with the messy hair looked at the "b+1" on the question, frowned and thought for a while, then quickly forced himself to shake his head.

No, no, no, it's impossible, impossible, impossible...

Based on my intuition for math olympiad problems, although the data here is obscure and difficult, it doesn't feel out of place during the solution process. In fact, "b+1" is often the key to solving the problem. This doesn't seem like a mistake that occurred during manual transcription...

If the data was indeed copied incorrectly... then your problem-solving process should at least feel stiff, like a gear getting stuck.

The admiral with the messy hair covered his head, shook his head, and quickly dispelled his doubts.

However, after shaking his head for a while, Admiral Chicken Coop looked around at the admirals lying on the beach solving problems, and suddenly seemed to have thought of something.

"But what if...it wasn't a mistake..."

The man with the messy hair looked at the admirals in front of him and muttered to himself.

The moment those words were spoken, a strange, chilling feeling surged up the face of the chicken-haired admiral, causing goosebumps to rise all over his body and his hair to stand on end.

"Huh? Old Fang, what did you just say?" The bespectacled admiral turned around curiously when he heard the messy-haired admiral's voice.

“…Wait, let me try…let me try…” The spiky-haired admiral did not answer the bespectacled admiral’s words. He simply picked up his pen and changed “b+1” on the test paper in his hand to “(b+1) squared”, and then began to solve the problem without stopping.

As the "Chicken-Haired Admiral" picked up his pen and began to calculate, a wonderful sense of smoothness arose within him.

It was as if the gears had been coated with lubricant, making the meshing of every part incredibly smooth.

The admiral with the wispy head picked up his pen and began calculating rapidly, quickly filling page after page of the calculation sheet. Time passed by, and the admiral had already filled more than a dozen pages of calculation sheet.

at last.

The chicken-headed admiral, pale-faced, put down his pencil and stared at his calculations without uttering a word.

"Old Fang...you, you didn't actually figure out the answer after changing the data, did you?" The bespectacled admiral looked at the messy-haired admiral with an expression of disbelief.

The bespectacled admiral still vividly remembers how his gang had just bullied those two little girls.

If the "Chicken-Haired Admiral" actually figured out the answer using the data provided by those two little girls, this would be a real mess...

"...No." The admiral with the messy hair shook his head, his face pale.

"That's good." The bespectacled admiral breathed a sigh of relief.

"I only calculated half of it, but the calculation data that led me into a dead end has disappeared." The chicken-haired admiral picked up the calculation paper and said to his friend in a silly manner, "Although I haven't completely solved this problem yet, my math intuition tells me that the square of b+1 is the more correct data."

After saying that, the admiral with the messy hair slumped down and put down the paper in his hand, looking at the beach with a bitter smile as if he had lost his soul.

"Ah, this..." The bespectacled admiral's eyes widened. "No, no way..."

“I can guarantee it.”

"But, but didn't you say that your math intuition told you there were no mistakes when you copied the problem?" the bespectacled admiral stammered.

“…Hehe…” Upon hearing this, the Admiral with the messy hair burst out laughing. “…I just suddenly realized something.”

"what is the problem?"

“If it’s just a simple transcription error, anyone with some experience in solving Olympiad math problems can quickly sense the inconsistency.” The admiral with the messy hair held the test paper in his hand, his eyes wide, and said to his friend in a low voice, “But what if… the error in the data isn’t a transcription error, but rather an academic charade by someone with equally extensive experience in solving Olympiad math problems?”

"what?"

"Someone with extensive problem-solving experience can manipulate the problem, creating a flawed data that most people won't notice," the admiral with the messy hair chuckled bitterly. "Brilliant, brilliant, truly... brilliant! Just by removing that tiny square, this set of key data becomes the key to a dead end, and it even gives people a strong sense of smoothness along the way, until they are deeply trapped without realizing it... The person who can think of this is definitely a formidable and ruthless character!"

Chapter 2583 The Shadow of Ginkgo

"Wait...wait, Lao Fang, what do you mean by that?!" The bespectacled admiral next to him seemed to understand what the messy-haired man meant. He was so frightened that his face was covered in sweat, and his eyes widened.

"Listen, friend, we've all misunderstood something. In many people's eyes, we're not solving a bunch of ridiculously difficult math problems... we're competing!" The Admiral with the messy hair gritted his teeth and spoke to the Admiral with glasses, "We're competing for ownership of that research ship girl who can defy the odds! Only the first person to solve it wins!"

"You mean... it really is..."

"Heh heh heh! What a free rubbing, what a test paper..." The chicken-headed admiral gritted his teeth, viciously crumpling the test paper in his hand into a ball, his veins bulging. "We've been tricked—!"

"But, but an entire beach of admirals, so many eyes..." the bespectacled admiral stammered.

"Fake! All fake!" The admiral with the messy hair stared at his friend, lowering his voice as he said, "Have you forgotten? This exam paper was copied by several admirals who were in the top fifty! Heaven knows how many of these people are their people!"

"My God... How dare they..."

"That's the allure of research ship girls!" the admiral with the messy hair said to his friend. "These exam papers are provided for free. For those high-ranking admirals, they don't bear any responsibility anyway. Even if someone discovers it, they can simply cover it up with a mistake. Besides..."

"not to mention?"

"Phew..." The admiral with the messy hair let out a long sigh, his gaze turning cold. "This set of questions has been around for a month... and the original version of the questions is right there on the sea. Why, for a whole month! Not a single person has noticed that the data in even one question is wrong!"