An Expert Is actually By My Side

Chapter 99 Contestant No. 101 has gone far

To be honest, this question really stumped Hao Yun.

After reading the topic for a long time, he was stunned that he didn't type out a single line of code.

Optimizing code for "glacier engine"?

Improve engine operating efficiency by ten percent?

Speaking of which, he hasn't seen what the underlying code of this engine looks like...

At the same time, the backstage of the game scene.

At the request of Academician Zhan Yongshu, the staff called up the screen of contestant No. 101.

Looking at the fourth question that appeared on the screen, Professor Zhang Cunhao, standing next to Academician Zhan, shook his head with a smile, and said in a regretful but unsurprising tone.

"I didn't expect him to choose the fourth question. It seems that there is no play."

"Oh?" Academician Zhan Yongshu raised his eyebrows with interest.

"Teacher, don't you forget that before I returned to teach at Shuimu University, I worked in the front-line position of the software R\u0026D department of Longwin Group?" Professor Zhang Cunhao said jokingly.

"I haven't read the specific content of the topic yet. Is this glacier engine also a product of your department?"

"That's not true. This product itself was developed by an acquired R\u0026D team, but our software R\u0026D department has optimized this product. The current Glacier 3.0 is the product after our second optimization. Now the mainstream large-scale 3D Action games, especially the third-person genre, are basically made with this engine!" Professor Zhang Cunhao said, with a proud look on his face.

However, he does have capital to be proud of.

Longwei Group is a giant in Xiaguo's electronics industry, and its huge software research and development team is one of the factors that laid this foundation. Even though video games are a novelty that appeared after the new calendar, no software engineer takes it lightly.

Professor Zhang Cunhao's meaning is very clear.

Compared with the other three questions that do not have limited acceptance criteria for results, this question with clear requirements for performance improvement is absolutely impossible to complete!

Because this is the brainchild of countless software engineers!

Because this is the product of countless optimizations!

Because this is the most concise code!

It is like a work of art, not a single letter is superfluous!

Not to mention the students sitting here, even the main examination committee standing here, it is almost impossible to solve this fourth question in just three days.

Of course, a longer meeting is still possible.

"To be honest, this kind of topic that even you feel helpless to appear in this kind of competition for college students...isn't it a bit inappropriate?" Academician Zhan Yongshu glanced at Professor Zhang Cunhao and said.

Professor Zhang Cunhao said with a smile: "Isn't it a common practice to set a trap question among the four questions in previous competitions? This is also to examine the seriousness of the contestants to their own objective situation. I believe that as long as you use your brain a little bit, you can think of this kind of commercial application. There is no chance of optimizing mature software.”

Academician Zhan Yongshu chuckled, but did not speak.

He can probably guess a little bit, the reason for using this kind of question as a trap question.

One is, of course, as Professor Zhang Cunhao said, it is the practice of the Hope Cup competition to put one of the four questions to bury people. As for the second, it may also be related to Longwei Group's sponsorship fees.

After all, for a national event like the Hope Cup, which has attracted the attention of countless college students and professionals, no one has done the last big question, which itself is a terrific gimmick.

Using this gimmick to promote is more topical than any hard advertising.

Thinking that the entire examination system of this competition was sponsored by Longwei Group for free to the organizer, Academician Zhan Yongshu didn't say anything, but he didn't expect too much from the contestant on the screen.

After all, even if he came by himself, he might not be able to increase the performance of the Glacier 3.0 engine by 10% in three days. Looking at it from another angle, if there is such an easy way to do it, the development team of Glacier Engine and the software engineers responsible for optimizing the engine must have thought of it long ago.

Choosing research topics that you are good at and avoiding topics that are obviously a waste of time and energy are also essential qualities for a programmer.

Failing that...

In this game, player No. 101 has gone far!

...

Hao Yun didn't know that he had only read the questions for a while, and several industry leaders standing in the background of the examination room not far away had already foreseen his ending.

Is it really over?

At first, Hao Yun also thought so pessimistically.

After all, after he went through the code of the entire glacier engine quickly, it took a lot of effort just to understand it.

"First calm down..."

"Then, you have to figure out the logic of how this engine works."

Making graphics data output faster and with higher quality is an important criterion for a good engine. Presumably, before putting this engine online, the developers of Glacier Engine had already racked their brains to optimize its code.

It is not impossible to go further than the efforts of the predecessors, but if you want to do it in just three days with one person's strength, I am afraid that your system plug-in will have to be strengthened.

in this case……

It is almost impossible to optimize the code of the engine itself.

My only hope, I am afraid, is only in places other than the code of the engine itself.

For example, those low-level functions that are called frequently?

Regardless of whether it is a 3D engine or a 2D engine, whether it is the popular "glacier" in China or the popular "wasteland" abroad, in the final analysis, all game engines need to call the underlying functions frequently, and the lower the function is, the more frequently it is called. .

Especially the 3D graphics rendering this one!

Sometimes the player encounters a large scene and freezes, or even the character hangs in the air and passes through the wall. In fact, the reason is largely because the speed of the graphics algorithm cannot keep up.

If you can optimize the underlying functions...

Maybe I really have hope to solve this problem?

For a moment, Hao Yun was taken aback by his crazy thoughts.

Fuck?

He carefully calculated it in his mind, this frankly seems to be more difficult than optimizing the glacier engine!

After all, the glacier engine is still a product after the first year of the new calendar, but the underlying functions called by the glacier engine have been developed before the era of the People's Federation.

but……

What if it works?

Swallowing, Hao Yun thought of giving it a try, found the math.c file in the code folder under the glacier engine directory, and opened a large number of called functions stored in it.

It is obviously unrealistic to read these codes from beginning to end, but Hao Yun did not intend to do such a stupid thing.

He only needs to find the function that is called the most times when the engine is running, is called almost every time the game scene is loaded, and is enough to affect the engine's operating efficiency, and then go inside to find opportunities for improvement.

Soon, Hao Yun locked a function named Q_Sqrt.

This function looks unremarkable on the surface, but it is just an algorithm for finding the reciprocal of the square root using Newton's iterative method.

What's interesting, however, is that during the operation of this engine, the number of situations that require the reciprocal of the square root is outrageous.

So looking at it from another angle, the operation speed of this function is enough to affect the efficiency of the engine itself.

This is like a screw on a space rocket. On the surface, the speed of the rocket does not depend on the screw itself, but depends on the design of the rocket engine and key fuel, etc., but when the design of the rocket engine and fuel technology They have all developed to the bottleneck. If you want to further improve the efficiency of the rocket, you can only start researching from the fundamental materials.

What Hao Yun is doing right now is something similar.

However……

Although the idea has been found, it is not easy to walk through this road.

So far, there is nothing worth digging. After all, the Newton iteration method itself is already a very good mathematical method for finding the reciprocal of the square root.

Want to innovate again?

Mathematical improvement is almost impossible!

If you want to go faster than this, I'm afraid it can only be achieved by building a huge database of input and output values.

However, building a library for a mere function seems to be putting the cart before the horse...

Time passed by, and Hao Yun's computer still hadn't typed a single line of code.

Academician Zhan Yongshu, who was watching from the background, sighed lightly, with a look of disappointment in his eyes.

Obviously, the No. 101 contestant has fallen into a dead end. If he can't change his strategy immediately and change a topic, his progress will be far behind by other contestants!

At least what they saw was that there were already three seeded contestants who had advanced to a quarter of the progress of the other three questions.

"Although the courage is commendable, there will be no results if this continues," Professor Zhang Cunhao said with a smile. "I just looked around, and it seems that he is still working on the fourth question."

"It's very problematic if this kind of topic appears in the competition," Academician Zhan Yongshu shook his head, "We can't do such nonsense in the next competition."

Professor Zhang Cunhao smiled awkwardly and coughed lightly: "Next time."

However, just when they both thought that there was no hope for player 101, Hao Yun, who was sitting at the computer desk, suddenly moved.

However, his operation seems a little weird?

I saw that he was not in a hurry to write any code, but directly deleted the code about the Q_Sqrt function in the math.c file.

"What does he want to do?"

Looking at Hao Yun's operations on the screen, Zhang Cunhao was surprised by the player's enigmatic movements.

He can probably guess what this contestant is going to do. He just wants to redefine the algorithm of "inverse square reciprocal". However, is there any simpler algorithm than Newton's iteration in this world?

In other words, this is no longer the category of programming, but the field of mathematics, right?

Dean Zhan Yongshu was also surprised, and didn't understand what Hao Yun was going to do for a while. It wasn't until he saw a line [i=0x5f375a86-(i》1)] appearing on the screen that he narrowed his pupils slightly.

"I might know what he's up to."

"...?"

Zhang Cunhao looked at his teacher with a confused face, trying to find the answer.

However, academician Zhan Yongshu didn't intend to answer his confusion at all, he just stroked the stubble of his chin, looked at the code on the screen and nodded in approval.

"Wonderful..."

"It's really wonderful!"