What the Averages Discard
"Wow!"
Chul-jun had been completely absorbed in Korean history for the past few days.
The purchase history on his tablet's e-reader was packed with books on Korean history and biographies of great historical figures.
Among his ancestors, there were bad people, and there were good people.
Whenever he came across an intriguing figure while reading, he immediately bought their biography and looked up all the opinions of modern historians about them.
Naturally, learning about the good people was much more enjoyable than reading about the bad ones.
Admiral Yi Sun-sin is so cool!
The blueprints for the Geojunggi are this precise? Jeong Yak-yong was a literal calculation genius!
Whoa, the Jagyeongru? Telling the time automatically using only iron balls and levers in an era without electricity? It's like a computer algorithm. Jang Yeong-sil was amazing.
Wow, King Sejong is the best! Our astronomy was over a century ahead of Europe's back then. Did King Sejong ever sleep? He read books, observed the stars, and even composed music!
Traveling back through history was different from walking the path paved by mathematical concepts.
When he realized that he only existed today because of those who came before him, the concept of a "people"—a shared national identity—finally clicked.
But as his reading reached modern history, Chul-jun's brow furrowed.
Invasion, division, war, and the fracturing of national identity.
From this point on, his mind grew complicated.
It brought back the fundamental secret he could never allow anyone to discover—a secret that, if revealed, might brand his late father, Jaegang, as a liar.
It was a lie Chul-jun had to carry for the rest of his life if he wanted to keep living happily in South Korea.
Because that lie was so monumental, Chul-jun made it a rule never to tell any other lies to the people he grew close to.
The nicer they were to him, the guiltier he felt.
Chul-jun didn't really have a sense of national identity yet.
He had never been North Korean, nor had he ever been Chinese.
He was simply Jaegang's son.
Since his father Jaegang was Korean, he had become Korean too.
Yet, looking at history laid out so coldly, the guilt he had tried so hard to ignore began to squirm in a corner of his chest.
It made him incredibly uncomfortable.
So, he tried to strip away his emotions and absorb it purely as objective knowledge.
Japan...
A country that bit off more than it could chew, starting wars left and right, only to poke the United States and get gifted Little Boy and Fat Man, personally demonstrating the horrors of atomic bombs to the entire world.
Looking into it further, it was also Japan that had standardized and popularized the method for detoxifying blowfish.
Countless lives must have been sacrificed to acquire such reliable knowledge on detoxification, which, in a way, could be considered a noble sacrifice for humanity.
Suddenly, a bizarre connection formed between atomic bombs and blowfish.
Are they both, in a sense, sacrifices that ended up helping humanity?
Since atomic bombs haven't been used in war again after they were dropped on Japan?
In any case, because Korea was their closest neighbor during the wars they started, it had suffered immensely, leaving deep, lingering scars.
So that's why they say we must always win the Korea-Japan match.
He recalled what his father Jaegang used to say.
"Whether it's China, Japan, or Russia, we have to cooperate if our national interests are on the line. But what's annoying is annoying. No, you don't need to hate the people of those countries themselves. There are bad guys and plenty of good guys in every country. It's the same for Korea. Oh? Oh... Shoot! No! How did he miss that? Dammit! They missed that? Idiots! We have to win the Korea-Japan match!"
We can absolutely never lose to Japan.
Of course, they shouldn't lose to other countries either, but especially not to Japan.
This was the moment he truly understood the weight of the phrase "Korea-Japan match" that he had heard in the research lab.
Chul-jun's lips pouted out in a sharp, determined line.
"So he agreed to come on set days twice a week?"
"Yes. And I told him he can drop by whenever he has questions!"
"And, uh, is he going to enter the KMO?"
"He said he'd think about it. I also asked him about the KPhO and the KAO, but since you have to be in middle school to take those..."
"But he's definitely hooked on astronomy for now, right?"
"Yes! Absolutely!"
"Good, good."
Seo Young-ho, the head of the Astronomy Department, smiled warmly.
The dean had promised that if they could just recruit that boy into the gifted education center, they would increase their research funding next year—no, starting immediately.
A massive stroke of good fortune had practically rolled right into their laps.
"You know what you need to do, right?"
Research Professor Cha Sun-hyuk grinned.
"Of course!"
"Whew. Because of the budget, we were looking at cutting down on conference attendance and laying off researchers starting next year. We barely survived."
And that wasn't all.
If things kept going south, they might have had to face the humiliation of being absorbed into the Physics Department in a few years.
"By the way."
Department Head Seo Young-ho's bright expression stiffened slightly.
"Are you going to keep pushing that?"
"You mean... the error in the dark matter micro-filaments?"
"Yeah. It's making me really uncomfortable. You know how small our academic circle is. You refuted them once, and that's enough. You can't win anyway. They have the Subaru Telescope data. Their evidence is just too solid."
"......"
"If they decide to drag us through the mud when we publish our own papers later, it's going to be a massive headache."
Cha Sun-hyuk furrowed his brow instead of nodding.
"I'm going to plot it soon. There's a fairly consistent pattern to just write it off as noise..."
"No. You know better than anyone how hard it is to prove anything using only the public SDSS raw data. Your logic and evidence have to be absolutely bulletproof. I know how capable you are. I'm sure you felt something was off. Maybe Japan really is wrong, and you're right. But if you take this all the way, it won't work. How are you going to capture noise that gets completely wiped out during computer preprocessing?"
"......"
"We need to get allocated observation time on the Subaru Telescope soon. If we sour our relationship with them, do you think they'll even bother looking at our proposal?"
"......"
"If you aren't 100% confident you can cut their heads off, let's drop it here. Okay? Do you think I don't want to see those arrogant bastards squirm? Do you think my stomach isn't turning? I absolutely detest those guys who easily pump out papers relying solely on high-resolution spectroscopic data! But what can we do? To refute them, we need something two or three times more powerful! We're in completely different weight classes! Or what, are you going to go back to the Netherlands and refute them from there? Maybe they'd be a bit intimidated then! Go! Just go back to Leiden! Why did you come here to suffer like this? Get out of here! Seriously! It breaks my heart just watching you!"
Cha Sun-hyuk stared blankly at the department head, who was clearly overreacting, and pouted.
"Ah, seriously..."
"Seriously what!"
"Fine, I get it."
"...You do?"
"Yes."
"Then..."
"If I can't find anything that can definitively cut their heads off, I won't make a half-hearted fuss. I'll give it until the summer conference, and if nothing comes up, I'll drop it cleanly."
"Can't you just drop it now?"
"Well, Chul-jun..."
"Huh?"
"He suddenly got fired up..."
"Fired up about what?"
"He suddenly started huffing and puffing, saying we can't even lose a game of rock-paper-scissors to Japan and that we absolutely have to win the Korea-Japan match. Then he took all the SDSS raw data I was analyzing."
Department Head Seo Young-ho blinked.
"Uh... what is an elementary schooler going to understand by looking at that?"
Cha Sun-hyuk scratched his head.
"Well, he actually knows quite a lot. He knows how to read the data and what to look for."
"Come on... doesn't he just know how to read basic graphs?"
"No, he actually cross-references and analyzes the data."
"......"
"He said he's looking for something in the micro-gravitational deviation values that the Japanese researchers classified as noise and completely discarded during preprocessing. He said he needs to look at it in 3D..."
"Is that even possible? Even with supercomputers, the calculations are so complex that we compromise with 2D."
"Anyway, I'll keep looking into it until the summer conference. If I just tuck my tail and give up now, the kid might lose interest entirely. I at least need to be able to make an excuse like, 'We did everything we could, but we were outmatched in equipment and authority.' What if he gets disappointed and stops coming?"
The department head quickly nodded.
They absolutely could not let that happen.
"Alright, alright. Let's hold onto it a bit longer until his interest wanes."
"Yes, sir!"
"Sigh, but an elementary schooler looking at SDSS data?"
The department head shook his head, finding it utterly impossible to believe.
Hyeong-man and Chul-jun were sitting together on the sofa watching TV for the first time in a while.
They had bought a huge bag of puffed rice from the truck parked in front of their apartment complex.
The living room was quiet.
Amidst the loud *crunch, crunch* of puffed rice being chewed, the sharp *clack!* of a Baduk stone being placed echoed from the TV.
The match currently being broadcast was the "Future Stars Rookie Championship."
"Ah, that's another unexpected move! The win rate calculated by the AI has plummeted straight into the 30% range!"
"But as we know, the moves played by Park Si-woo 2-dan always seem to leave the AI utterly baffled."
"Haha, it'll be fun to see if that's the case this time as well. He did end up losing after playing like that once before, didn't he?"
"Well, even so, it was a beautiful defeat. These days, all professional players practice with AI, so they rarely experience moves like that. AI simply doesn't play that way. But Baduk is a game played by humans. That's why moves like this can actually work."
"Haha, Choi Chul-min 7-dan, you're getting excited again. You must really like Park Si-woo 2-dan. That might sound a bit biased."
"No, if AI is the absolute answer, we might as well just have AI play against AI from now on. But would that be any fun? I'm just rooting for the player who plays the most human Baduk among the rookies..."
"Aigo, let's stop there. Oh! The opponent has responded. Haha, they're just letting it slide. It seems Park Si-woo 2-dan pushed a bit too hard this time. Oh? He's pushing in again!"
"Look at that! The win rate has shifted! Park Si-woo 2-dan's move is..."
Hyeong-man stole a glance at Chul-jun, who was happily munching on his puffed rice.
Seeing him grin from ear to ear, it seemed Chul-jun's friend, Si-woo, was playing well today.
Last time, Chul-jun's face had been stiff, and Si-woo had lost that match.
"Haha, he's already a 2-dan."
"Isn't Si-woo cool?"
"If he wins this, he's in the finals of the Rookie Championship."
"He's already won."
"Oh, really?"
"He's got the momentum. Once Si-woo starts pushing in like that, there's no stopping him. I can feel his opponent panicking."
"Haha..."
"It's true that practicing with AI increases your win rate because it only teaches you perfect moves. But those are just averages. And averages can be a bit misleading. The average of 90 and 10 is 50, but the number 50 doesn't actually exist in that set. In some situations, 90 is correct, and in others, 10 is correct, but the AI just tells you 50. Sure, your win rate goes up, but if you only practice like that, you won't know when to play a 90 in extreme situations. When you force an opponent like that to play a 90, they start to falter. Humans can't beat AI, but a human can beat another human who only studied with AI!"
"Huh..."
Hyeong-man smacked his lips and picked up another piece of puffed rice.
Sometimes Chul-jun would suddenly burst into these long explanations, and in times like this, it was best to just nod along.
Asking questions would only invite even more difficult concepts.
Hyeong-man had recently realized that Chul-jun talked like this when he was organizing his own thoughts.
*Crunch.*
"A computer's classification can't always be entirely correct. There has to be something in the things it discarded while searching for the optimum. Nothing in this world is completely useless. Uncle, you know Gödel, right?"
"Uh... I think I've heard the name..."
"He was a mathematician. Oh, did he do philosophy too? Anyway, he said in his Incompleteness Theorems that no system can prove all truths within itself."
"Haha..."
Hyeong-man quickly popped a piece of puffed rice into his mouth and chewed.
Usually, if he just nodded, Chul-jun would talk for a bit and then stop, but today the atmosphere felt a bit different.
"He proved the limits of mathematics using mathematics itself, showing that truth can still exist within the things discarded by an optimized system!"
"......"
"Ah! Lee Sang-in 3-dan finally resigns!"
"Wow, Si-woo won."
*Crunch.*
Chul-jun grinned, shifting excitedly on the sofa.
Then, his brow furrowed slightly.
Hyeong-man tilted his head and looked at Chul-jun.
That face—though Hyeong-man didn't know exactly what it meant—was the face Chul-jun made when he realized something incredibly important.
In moments like this, it was best not to disturb him and just watch quietly.
Because that tiny head of his was currently spinning at maximum capacity.
Once, he had stayed like that for over five minutes.
After a moment, he would suddenly dash off to his room.
To avoid disturbing him, Hyeong-man carefully lifted himself off the sofa.
"Ah! The things discarded from the average!"
Chul-jun's brow smoothed out, his eyes widening. He sprang to his feet and, just as expected, dashed straight into his room.
Hyeong-man chuckled, watching the bedroom door, when Chul-jun suddenly popped his head back out.
"Can I eat this in my room?"
"Huh? Oh, sure."
"Thank you!"
Clutching the entire bag of puffed rice, Chul-jun disappeared back into his room.
"Haha... honestly..."
Hyeong-man shook his head with a smile and began brushing away the stray crumbs of puffed rice scattered across the sofa and table.