Ho, as it turned out, had a very strict and peculiar itinerary planned for the trip. He’s particularly fond of ramen-noodle dishes, and his goal on this jaunt, he told her, was to visit as many Tokyo ramen shops as possible. To make sure they crammed in as many as they could, he’d created some custom code. Huh? she thought. He explained: First, he’d assembled a list of top Tokyo noodle places and plotted them on a Google Map. Then he’d written code that drew the optimum pathway that connected all the shops, so they could travel in the most efficient route between them. It was, he said, a “pretty traditional” algorithmic challenge, of the sort you learn in college, and he used tricks like this all the time to optimize the way he lived his life. He whipped out his phone to show her the map. He told her he was planning on keeping careful notes about the quality of each meal, too.