We had to go to London yesterday to a location that I had never been to before and so I programmed my GPS unit to let me know how to get there and, more importantly, will I be there on time? And, we were off.
To get to the location, I had scoped out the route using Google Maps before leaving but, once in the car, put my trust in Nigel, our trusty Mio GPS unit. Everyone names their electronics, don’t they? My destination was North London-ish although with the growth of the city, it almost seems like it’s mid-London now. Interestingly, Google Maps and Nigel had different ideas about how to get there. Google Maps wanted me to take Highbury Avenue into the city and work my way back. Nigel wanted me to get off at the Lambeth exit and head into the city that way.
So Nigel won because he was in the car with us and we didn’t want to upset him.
We got there in plenty of time and I got to experience first-hand the joys of the transit strike in the city. I made one incorrect turn leaving Warncliffe to go onto Horton but that turned out to be a time saver as the backups on Warncliffe were quite long. This took us to the heart of London and its tall buildings and, of course, Nigel complained “GPS Signal Lost”. Thankfully, his display didn’t go off and as a former resident of Huron County and frequent visitor to the Forest City, I got onto Richmond Street and headed north where we got the signal and ultimately our location in the predicted time.
On the way home, Nigel had a different plan for getting out of the city but I knew of a restaurant where we could enjoy a meal and headed towards that. At every corner, Nigel chimed in “Route Recalculation”. Finally, we were so far out Oxford Street that he just kept repeating “Turn Back”. Apparently, we were really off the grid.
As we enjoyed our meal, we were jokingly talking about Nigel and artificial intelligence and GPS and the like. Later on, that evening, I was reading this article and relaxed, just enjoying the whole realm of GPS and navigation and how it has become part of the driving experience.
But, over lunch, I also recalled some old, actually really old, learning that happened during university. At the time, it was seemingly one of those make-work problems that they give us. I still remember it because it was actually quite interesting. It was also a very rich problem with all kinds of opportunities to show some creativity.
It goes something like this “Given an nxn matrix filled with 0s and 1s where a 0 represents an open step and a 1 represents a closed step, determine a path to navigate through the matrix from point (0,0) to (n,n).
Then, as a challenge. “Modify the program to find the shortest path from (0,0) to (n,n).
And then “After each move, generate a random number between 1 and 10. If the result is a 7, generate a random co-ordinate in the matrix and invert it so that a 0 becomes a 1 or a 1 becomes a 0, and adjust your route accordingly”.
As part of what I thought was inspiring lunch conversation, I then started to talk about the algorithm that I developed to solve the problem and my wife’s eyes immediately glazed over. To her credit, she can only take so much of me when I get off on these tangents. We shifted to talk about other things, but inwardly, I marvelled that I had some insight about how a GPS worked and had actually done some programming, albeit simple programming, that was the basis for modern GPS units.
Why, on earth, would I remember that one problem from all of the problems that I’ve ever solved in all of the programming languages that I’ve ever learned. I do remember the problem as clearly as if it happened yesterday. It was interesting; it was challenging; it was intriguing; at the time, I remember being fully immersed in solving it. I had no idea at the time that it would be anything more than academia or that it would be lunch hour conversation.
Shouldn’t we aspire to create as much of our teaching and learning this memorable?
