Days wandering around Hogwarts

Chapter 511 Good Ways to Improve Efficiency

There was usually no one on the road to Charles' laboratory, but today Charles met Dumbledore here.

Dumbledore said to him, "I found a place to build a castle. It's on the coast of Scotland. It's called Tiger Hill."

"The landlord there is willing to use the land to build a magic research institute, and the only requirement is that only his family can open a cafe there."

Charles smiled and said that he knew how to attract investment.

He said: "I recently took the time to design the castle, and will start full work after Voldemort is killed."

To do this requires the actual support of the Ministry of Magic and Dumbledore's face, but now that Voldemort is there, they have no extra energy to deal with this matter.

Especially because of Dumbledore's reputation, only he can invite high-level wizards. If the wizards who come are all ugly, it would be better not to do this.

Dumbledore noticed that Charles spoke of killing Voldemort as easily as Hermione would eat a sponge pudding drizzled with maple syrup.

He thinks it is a good thing for young people to have confidence and there is no need to suppress them too much, but he still needs to find opportunities to remind them not to underestimate the enemy.

Dumbledore thought, why not fight him when I have time to test his level.

The two came to the laboratory, where Professor Delacour had been waiting for a while.

He asked Charles, "What experiment are you going to do?"

Charles placed all the potions and materials on the table and said, "I plan to try to increase the strength of the aluminum alloy to make a security doll."

The history of electrolytic aluminum is only 109 years old, and alchemical research on aluminum is still very limited.

Charles has done cost calculations and found that if aluminum alloy is used to make the puppet's outer armor, the same volume of aluminum alloy armor will be half the price of stainless steel.

If alchemy can significantly improve the performance of aluminum alloys at a reasonable cost, he would even dare to do business with Boeing, Airbus, Tupolev, etc.

Dumbledore asked him, "What do you think?"

Charles explained his ideas, mainly using several highly versatile chemicals to improve the strength, hardness, toughness and other properties of the material.

First resolve whether there is a problem, and then consider further digging into the performance.

The experiment looked unremarkable, but what Dumbledore and Professor Delacour valued was Charles's strange experimental method, and they came here today for this reason.

Previously, when Charles was doing alchemical metal resistance experiments, they discovered that his selection of parameters such as reagents and temperatures was strange and not rounded to integers.

Charles quickly prepared two potions and said, "The method to increase hardness is simple. Use a potion made by mixing two potions. The main task is to find the ratio of the two."

"I used the concentration of one of the drugs as an indicator. The lowest and highest were 1% and 99%."

"Now I am mixing four doses of medicine, with concentrations of 1%, 38.4%, 61.6% and 99% respectively."

Dumbledore asked, "How were 38.4% and 61.6% determined?"

These two numbers with decimal points don't seem to be anything special, but why did Charles choose them?

This is the problem that Dumbledore and Professor Delacour are going to solve today.

While preparing the potion, Charles said, "This is the folded paper method in Hua Luogeng's optimization method. Suppose there is a piece of paper with the lower limit of the value on the left end and the upper limit on the right end. Suppose the length of the paper is 1000, then make a mark at 0.618, which is 618 times the length of the paper, and then fold it in half. Make a mark at 618 on the corresponding position of the other side after folding. That position is 382. Let's take these two values ​​for the experiment first." "Compare the experimental results. If the result at 382 is better, we will cut off the right side of the paper at 618, otherwise cut off the left side at 382."

“If the right side is cut off, the strip from 0 to 618 is folded in half again, and the corresponding 382 is obtained at 236.

"Do the experiment again with this number, then cut off the corresponding part, continue folding and finally get the best result."

"Generally speaking, the optimal solution can be obtained after about 10 attempts."

"You can also take two points, 0.618 and 0.382, at a time, compare the four points, remove the data with the worst result, and then take these two points for the next experiment."

After he finished speaking, he had already prepared four doses of medicine, threw aluminum plates of the same specifications into the beakers, and drew pictures on paper to explain.

Dumbledore nodded, feeling that he understood.

"Wait!" Professor Delacour recalled something, "I remember you mentioned a similar method when you were in Marseilles, when you were making the sauce for sweet and sour fried fish and how to determine how much sugar and vinegar to add."

Charles scratched his head and remembered that there was such a thing, but Gabrielle liked it when it was made that day.

“That day I was talking about a two-factor approach,” he said.

"Suppose a piece of paper is sugar horizontally and vinegar vertically, with 0 in the lower left corner, and first determine the maximum amount."

"First, use the same method to determine how much vinegar to use with half sugar, and then use half vinegar to determine how much sugar to use at the bottom. Now there will be two points on the cross center line on the paper. Compare the quality. If half sugar is good, cut the bottom half, and if half vinegar is good, cut the left half."

"Then experiment step by step, and so on."

At this time, the reaction of all the aluminum plates in the beaker was completed. Charles took them out and cleaned them, put them on the Rockwell hardness tester for measurement, and then recorded the data.

Charles continued, "The experiment to increase the melting point involves temperature and the ratio of the reagents. I plan to use this method to conduct the experiment."

Next, Dumbledore fell into deep thought, Charles concentrated on the experiment, and Professor Delacour helped.

Tonight's experiment was very successful. After eight experiments, the optimal value was obtained. After processing, the hardness of the aluminum alloy reached the level required by Charles.

If we follow the previous practice, we will first experiment with integer multiples of five or ten, and then adjust it little by little. If we are lucky, we will find the peak in the first few times, but if we are unlucky, we will have to do several experiments.

The current method approaches the peak step by step, with higher accuracy and much faster speed.

Especially for experiments with two or more factors, it is common to try hundreds of times, which is time-consuming and laborious.

Now there is a new method that can reduce the number of experiments and save a lot of time and material costs.

Dumbledore discovered that not only alchemy, but also herbology could be experimented with this method.

Charles recorded today's data and packed up. Next, he would conduct experiments to strengthen the yield strength, tensile strength and other properties. It would not be as simple as today, so time would be a bit tight.

He looked at the time, it was a quarter to nine, so he said to Dumbledore, "I'm going to go to Farbottom Castle to see their research progress."

Dumbledore just nodded, feeling a little resentful towards the Ministry of Magic for putting so many things on Charles' shoulders, as if they were squeezing olive oil.

He then left, deciding to go talk to Snape about today's experiment.

(End of this chapter)