THE STERADIAN TRAIL: BOOK #0 OF THE INFINITY CYCLE Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lakshman.
    ‘Sorry Josh, she’s guilty as charged,’ Lakshman said.
    ‘In that case,’ Joshua said and turned to Divya, ‘you wouldn’t mind doing me a favour?’
    ‘Yes sir?’ Divya said.
    ‘Could you type all this up in LaTeX,’ Joshua said, circling a finger over her handiwork on the board, ‘and email it to me? I’m in the process of submitting the paper after the second round of revisions. I’ll now rejig the whole thing with your non-Robinsonian push-pop operation before sending it. You will of course be my co-author if that’s all right with you.’
    Divya looked at him, stunned. Co-author of a paper? With Joshua? Joshua Ezekiel? The Joshua Ezekiel? The Alfred P. Sloan Chair Professor at MIT? The world-renowned authority on algorithms? She couldn’t believe it. ‘This, in a paper, sir?’ she said, pointing at the whiteboard.
    ‘Yeah, this ,’ said Joshua with a smile. ‘Why do you look so surprised? You know what you’ve done? This fellow won’t let me tell you, but I’m going to anyway. You’ve pulled off a major coup under our very noses, that’s what you’ve done.’
    Divya, beginning to feel awkward, blushed.
    Lakshman beamed at her, proud beyond words. ‘She won a gold medal at the math Olympiad, Josh,’ he said. ‘So you shouldn’t be too surprised.’
    ‘I’ll try,’ Joshua said and turned to Divya. ‘I’ve got to go now, but we’ll be in touch on email. Here’s my card, and I’m sure I can reach you through this guy here.’
    ‘Yes sir,’ Divya nodded, her face all a-flush. Oh my God! I’m writing a paper with Joshua Ezekiel! ‘I also have another question, sir, if you don’t mind.’
    ‘Sure, if you don’t mind me packing up my things as we speak,’ Joshua began unplugging the wires from his laptop.
    ‘You said the RAND Corporation had the shortest path algorithm before Dijkstra. Why didn’t they publish it first, sir? Why did they keep it secret?’
    ‘Know anything about RAND?’
    ‘No sir, never heard of them.’
    ‘Look them up. They’re a military research organization, though these days they’re also into policy analysis and stuff to make up for all the bad press they got during the Cold War. If I have to guess, the army was using the algorithm for logistics, for planning the movements of troops, weapons and supplies; it was classified information. Today it’s a silly algorithm you find in every textbook, but fifty years ago it was a powerful secret that determined the course of a war.’
    ‘Why do you have to guess , Josh?’ Lakshman butted in. ‘If I remember right, you went to work for RAND right after your PhD.’
    ‘Shh,’ Joshua said, bringing a finger to his lips. ‘Don’t go raking up my past. Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.’
    Divya laughed. ‘I also have another question, sir. Not really a question but a doubt in my mind.’
    ‘As long as it has nothing to do with RAND or what I did for them,’ Joshua said, stuffing the laptop into a bag and strapping it in place.
    ‘No sir. It’s something do with your algorithm,’ Divya said. ‘You talked about how it can find the shortest paths between many origin-destination pairs. Can we also use it in a situation where we don’t want to just go from A to B but want to start at A, visit some other nodes, B, C, D, E and so on, and then finally come back to the starting point A as quickly as possible?’
    ‘Aha,’ said Joshua with a twinkle in his eyes.
    Lakshman smiled as well.
    ‘Well, I can assure you that this algorithm will never be able to handle the problem you describe. For that matter, no algorithm on earth can,’ Joshua said. ‘Because you’re no longer dealing with the warm and fuzzy domain of the Shortest Path Problem, you are now in the whole squalid world of the Travelling Salesman Problem. Heard of it?’
    ‘No sir,’ Divya said apologetically.
    ‘That’s surprising,’ Joshua said.
    ‘Come on, cut her some slack, Josh. She’s only in her third