The simplex algorithm directs wares to their destinations the world over (Image: PlainPicture/Gozooma)
YOU MIGHT not have heard of the algorithm that runs the world. Few people have, though it can determine much that goes on in our day-to-day lives: the food we have to eat, our schedule at work, when the train will come to take us there. Somewhere, in some server basement right now, it is probably working on some aspect of your life tomorrow, next week, in a year’s time.
Perhaps ignorance of the algorithm’s workings is bliss. The door to Plato’s Academy in ancient Athens is said to have borne the legend “let no one ignorant of geometry enter”. That was easy enough to say back then, when geometry was firmly grounded in the three dimensions of space our brains were built to cope with. But the algorithm operates in altogether higher planes. Four, five, thousands or even many millions of dimensions: these are the unimaginable spaces the algorithm’s series of mathematical instructions was devised to probe.
Perhaps, though, we should try a little harder to get our heads round it. Because powerful though it undoubtedly is, the algorithm is running into a spot of bother. Its mathematical underpinnings, though not yet structurally unsound, are beginning to crumble at the edges. With so much resting on it, the algorithm may not be quite as dependable as it once seemed.
To understand what all this is about, we must first delve into the deep and surprising ways in which the abstractions of geometry describe the world around us. Ideas about such connections stretch at least as far…
