Chapter 984 Preliminary Round: We Have a Big Advantage

According to the plan, Liu Hongbo needs to stay in France for about a week.

After all, Dassault is a mature company. No matter how much Edsteiner agrees with the Chinese design, he cannot make a decision to adopt it on a whim.

Before the final signature, necessary testing still needs to be done.

Although Liu Hongbo, as the representative of China, does not need to follow the entire process, he is at least responsible for providing technical support and ensuring that the basic testing process is completed.

The Falcon Z project has a tight schedule, but fortunately, as a relatively simple commercial project, there is nothing too much room for internal friction among the four partners.

During this period, Chang Haonan finally returned to his normal work rhythm and became busy again.

On the one hand, the Ocean No. 1 satellite is approaching the launch window. Although Lin Senming is actually responsible for most of the software and hardware adaptation work, Chang Haonan still needs to step in to check and finalize important nodes.

On the other hand, what is relatively more energy-consuming is preparing for the preliminary round of the numerical computing competition.

When the organizers of the competition issued the suggestion of "asking each special guest to come up with a question to enrich the question bank", they received extraordinarily enthusiastic feedback.

Most of those who make it onto the special invitation list already have a relatively high status in the industry.

As a discipline that is closer to engineering, in most cases, status is linked to experience.

Therefore, this suggestion directly awakened the memories of a group of bigwigs.

Many people uploaded the questions they had encountered recently, which they had refined and abstracted, and which they thought were classic or interesting.

It seems as if the contestants want to deprive them of their smiles forever.

Song Jingming even received many emails, saying that his inspiration for questions was like a spring, and one question could not cover the rich experience he had accumulated over decades, and strongly suggested increasing the number of questions that each person could submit...

All in all, it's very difficult to hold back.

Finally, in order to prevent many contestants from losing their temper in the preliminary round, Chang Haonan had to impose restrictions on the difficulty of the questions and the calculation time.

This made one of the professors working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) put aside his bold idea of throwing the "plasma fluid CFD" nuclear fusion theory research project into the question bank...

As a compromise, each special guest is allowed to provide a maximum of two questions.

Fortunately, although the process was a bit tortuous, the final result was not bad.

Before the preliminary round began at the end of February, the organizers of the conference drew out three questions under the witness of several special guests.

According to the competition rules, all participating teams need to submit engineering files and design description documents within 120 hours from the release of the topic. The final score will be calculated based on the sum of the two highest scores among the three questions.

This is a relatively standard rule in this era.

Therefore, almost all teams that have registered and are determined to reach the finals are basically focused on the three questions themselves.

The time for the question-asking session is set at 2:23 a.m. on February rd, Beijing time.

It's not very friendly to European contestants.

They need to get up in the middle of the night to look at the questions and then start answering them immediately.

But for Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, it was the night before.

In Professor Anthony Jameson's office.

Richard Hirsch, and two groups of participating students.

In addition to the group from Stanford University, the other three are from Santa Clara University, which is not far away.

Although this school has an engineering school, it does not specialize in the engineering field, so Professor Jameson easily found several contestants who wanted to participate through his personal connections.

Although the competition rules do not allow for reference teachers, it does not say that pre-match training is not allowed.

The six people in front of him are two of the “seed players” he found.

Of course, with such a big thing, it is impossible to just set up double insurance and everything will be fine.

In fact, COMSOL has signed up about 30 participating teams in total.

About two-thirds of them are relatively competitive.

However, these teams are scattered across the United States, and there are even two teams from Europe. It is impossible for them to travel all the way to the San Francisco Bay Area just for a preliminary round.

Moreover, it would be fine to provide guidance secretly in the name of pre-match training, but if it really makes too much noise, it would be embarrassing for everyone.

"There are less than 5 minutes left before the question is released..."

Hirsch looked down at his watch and broke the silence first.

In fact, there is an electronic clock hanging on the wall of the office, which does not need to tell the time this time.

He simply felt that the atmosphere here was a bit depressing, so he just picked a random topic.

Sure enough, after he started talking, the students who had been reluctant to speak up could no longer hold back.

"Professor, how likely do you think this topic is to be beneficial to us?"

A girl named Hermia Moreno asked.

“I can’t see all the questions in the question bank.”

Jameson had been sitting in the same position on the chair like a statue for almost an hour, until he heard this question, and finally moved a little:

“In general, the scope of the topic is mainly in the field of CFD, but it does not necessarily include only CFD, and other methods can also be appropriately combined.”

"If it is a classic type of problem such as continuous fluid turbulence, then we have the most obvious advantage. But on the other hand, if the problem involves granular fluid, or a super-large-scale calculation interval, which is not suitable for the finite volume method at all, it will be disadvantageous..."

In fact, Jameson didn't know the details until he participated in setting the questions.

Therefore, during the period of waiting for the release of the test, he was not completely free of pressure.

"Professor Jameson."

If we were to say who is most concerned about the results of the competition, it would naturally be Hirsch, a middle-level manager at COMSOL:

"You said before that it's unlikely that the organizers would cheat openly by leaking questions, but will they tamper with the process of drawing questions?"

This issue is a little sensitive.

Even Jameson hesitated for a while.

"I can't say."

He shook his head:

"Logically, they invited all the question setters to witness the question drawing process. Although most people are unlikely to make a special trip for this matter, the organizers have no control over who will choose to accept the invitation. Therefore, there are too many uncontrollable factors to tamper with the process."

“But then again, if they want to regain their advantage in the CFD field, manipulating the scope of questions is indeed a very cost-effective method…”

Once people start communicating, the tormenting feeling of every second feeling like an eternity will be much less severe.

So, before I knew it, the last five minutes had passed...

“Beep, beep—”

The timer that had been set long ago sounded a reminder sound, which was particularly harsh in the office building at night.

Jameson sat up straight at the speed of light, turned off the sound with one hand, and clicked refresh on the webpage with the other hand.

Torch Group is willing to spend money on servers, so the question-setting website will not crash like the course selection websites of some schools in later generations, which would crash directly after being clicked by tens of thousands of people.

About a minute later, a PDF document was downloaded to the computer desktop.

Jameson's hands were shaking a little, and he didn't even open the file until he double-clicked it a second time.

“The mechanism of groundwater seepage transport in soil particles involves the particle-fluid coupling process at the mesoscopic scale, namely, the soil movement at the particle scale, the flow of the fluid, and the interaction between the particles and the fluid…”

Looking at the questions displayed on the first page, several people couldn't help but feel nervous.

What are you afraid of?

This kind of particle-fluid problem, and the infinite boundary problem of groundwater seepage, is almost impossible to solve using a simple finite volume method. This is exactly what Jameson just mentioned as the "worst case scenario."

"No way……"

There was some annoyance in Helz's tone.

Although Jameson said nothing, he frowned.

However, he still patiently turned to the second page.

"For a subsonic aircraft with a cockpit, there is a streamline diagram as shown in the figure, which shows the flow separation area on the leeward side of the inverted cone, and the leeward flow separation point is a saddle point..."

The frowns on Jameson's and several students' faces gradually relaxed.

This problem is so simple and old-fashioned that it can hardly fully demonstrate the advantages of COMSOL Multiphysics. For some experienced people, they can even solve it by reinventing the wheel themselves.

However, for their purpose, it was enough.

"This question is just like... an example question from a textbook."

' said Hermia, in a tone that was half-smile.

"Don't underestimate the enemy."

Although Jameson was obviously in a good mood, he still warned:

"I'm afraid most teams will choose this question out of three choices. It actually tests basic skills more..."

As he spoke, he continued to turn the pages and came to the last question.

"Assume that the cross-sectional profile of the riverbed bottom of a shallow water area conforms to the following set of equations (3-1), and the water can be regarded as an incompressible fluid... Please establish a mathematical format for simulating the flow of two-dimensional shallow water..."

"and many more……"

Another student next to him immediately widened his eyes:

“This question…”

"I think... I've seen something similar during training before?"

He turned around in disbelief and looked at his companions.

Then I saw the same answer from other people’s eyes…

“We have a huge advantage!”

If it is said that after seeing the second question just now, Jameson's mentality was just relief.

Now, his feeling is...

ecstasy.

In fact, the person who submitted this question was Professor Jameson himself.

He and Hertz had thought of many possibilities beforehand, but they never thought it would go so smoothly...