Love Affairs in Melbourne-Chapter 270 - 265: Shining Appearance (4)

The first store’s sales were far hotter than the Yan siblings had expected.

And they quickly gathered a group of enthusiastic fans online.

Just after half a month, the "inventory" they had planned to sell slowly over three to five months was wiped out.

Due to a lack of "goods" available for sale, Y·Y had to close its doors.

That closure lasted a month.

Yan Yan and Yan Ling felt it was necessary to sit down and discuss their strategy.

Yan Ling came to New York.

Hot Dog Youth, enthusiasts of the dish, also arrived in New York at this time; Antonio was there to watch two of his close friends from Stanford participate in a competition.

Qi Yi and Antonio were roommates, living in a relatively rare two-person university apartment at Stanford.

But the two weren’t fellows of the mathematics school; Hot Dog Youth was from the Stanford University School of Engineering, majoring in mechanical engineering.

Antonio and his friends participating in the competition were also from the Stanford University School of Engineering, just in different years—one was two years above him, and the other was one year below.

They got to know Antonio at Stanford University’s SAIL Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Apart from loving hot dogs, Antonio also loved Chinese culture; a significant number of his friends were either Chinese or Chinese American.

The two "fellows" participating in this competition in New York were also Chinese like their roommate Qi Yi, and they were actual brothers.

The older brother was four years older and had come to Stanford four years earlier.

For an elite school like Stanford University, the tuition was astonishing, and a typical American middle-class family couldn’t afford to send two children to Stanford at the same time.

If the eldest had started from undergraduate and continued studying here up to Ph.D. level, and the younger one got admitted to this school before the elder had graduated,

then they’d need the support of a rather wealthy family.

The tuition alone was nearly a million a year.

If you added living expenses, you’d need about two million a year to cover schooling costs.

And that’s assuming that these two boys didn’t have expensive hobbies.

But Antonio’s classmates just happened to have one.

The brothers came from Stanford in Silicon Valley to New York to participate in a competition related to their hobby—a robot fighting competition.

The passion men have for robots, as well as for combat, is something most women cannot understand.

But supposedly, once a girl goes home and experiences it a few times, she can not only understand but also become equally enthusiastic.

Whether that’s really the case, Yan Yan, who had never seen such violent competitions, wouldn’t know.

These robot fighting competitions were unrestricted, a complete "fight to the death" scenario.

Having a disfigured appearance was minor.

The robots, built with huge investments, getting completely wrecked during a match was normal.

From a financial perspective, this hobby was a bottomless pit.

Of course, there were prizes for winning the competitions.

But everyone would need to accumulate some experience before designing the "world’s best fighting" robots.

No matter how good your robot-building skills are, if you can’t operate it smoothly, you’re still likely to lose.

The labs at Stanford University worked on high-end projects representing the pinnacle of human development, like collaborations with NASA on space projects, with Google on self-driving cars, or else on interdisciplinary studies like 3D printing of human organs involving medicine and material science.

But these two brothers didn’t like the school’s well-funded advanced projects; instead, they loved to personally fund and tinker with fierce, violent fighting robots.

High school students all had fighting robots, so how were the Stanford brothers supposed to make their interest in Artificial Intelligence "fun and educational"?

The robots in the fighting arena were all remote-controlled and required manual operation.

The Stanford brothers’ fighting robots were 100% Artificial Intelligence. When they brought their robots to compete, they didn’t issue a single command to their own robots, adopting a completely laissez-faire "free-range" attitude, letting the robots figure out the most reasonable attack methods on their own.

Compared to non-Artificial Intelligence robots, the brothers’ robots were much more expensive.

In order to win the "world champion" title, the brothers would have to fight each other first before comparing their robots to others’.

Every year, who knows how many robots they damaged and how much money they burned through.

These two precisely defined the term "wild kids."

But their father greatly supported and indulged the brothers’ hobbies.

"Wild-kids" dad thought that as long as the kids were still in school, they should do whatever makes them happy.

Whenever the son was tinkering, dad was even more enthusiastic, absolutely relentless until they grabbed that "world champion" title.

Tens of thousands were needed for the brothers’ potentially destructible "toys" to add a new part or chip, and "wild-kids" dad wouldn’t even blink.

This unique father named his eldest son Li Tianle and his second son Li Tianyou.

From their names, it’s clear that dad’s expectations for his sons were simple.

That both brothers could get into Stanford was definitely the highest praise for dad’s "free-range" policy.

Usually, what parents and children talk about the most is the importance of studying hard.

However, the father of the Li siblings always had a "shock-the-world" educational philosophy.

When the eldest son liked to play video games, he not only didn’t oppose it, but he also fully supported it.

If his son had such a hobby, he had to provide the best gaming equipment.

Thousands could buy a computer for others, but for Li dad, it would only be enough to buy a mouse pad for his son.

When the younger son joined the gaming crowd, he found it boring to always play at home with his brother.

Without hesitation, their father opened the most luxurious internet cafe in Shenzhen City Center.

The father personally led his two sons in a dedicated VIP room to form teams and play games all night.

At that time, both sons were still underage; if they went to someone else’s internet cafe, they wouldn’t even be "of legal age."

Children shouldn’t stay up late?

What a dreadfully antiquated thought!

"Wild-kids" dad never had such an educational idea.

They could sleep whenever they wanted.

If a child didn’t even have the freedom to decide when to sleep, then what joy was left in life?

People can stay up late for work, so why not for gaming?

But that still didn’t reach the level of "shock-the-world."

Li dad had even more "miraculous" hands-on educational methods.

For instance, after the brothers became adults, they went on vacation to the Maldives with their dad.

When a girl with both a perfect body and face arrived at the neighboring Water Villa, the father and sons started a competition.

What was the competition?

To see who among the eldest son, the younger son, and the father could win the girl’s heart first.