Asimov, Hari Seldon and I

[Arindam Banerjee]

I discovered Asimov in 1982. I had read Asimov before, as his works would appear in "Science Today". The Foundation series was a revelation to me. Later on, I would read his books on robotics, in the 90s. But the Foundation series was the most enthralling, what with the legendary Hari Seldon the great mathematician and his prediction of the future with complex maths.

In the mid 90s, while working for Telstra Research Labs, in the early 90s, I developed queuing theory to meet certain telecom needs, such as in signalling networks, with noted success. Much less busy tones, and that was made global with my international standardisation contribution which showed the nature of signalling traffic to be of Gaussian distribution, thus allowing easy dimensioning.

On that strength, I was given the job to solve a major problem then, the huge waiting queues at the Department of Social Service, now called Centrelink. To cut a long story short, I applied the basic methods of Hari Seldon - I made a huge digital simulation program with some 64000 variables and found out the best possible solution for optimising the parameters with pure brute force number crunching.

It was a showpiece program, at that time, being something of a first, in the mid 90s, for it was a complex application program which a single person could develop. I often demonstrated its functioning in the TRL foyer, to various invitees. There are tons of such apps now, of course, but in those days it was a novelty.

The app I made was a huge success, for it could distribute resources such that waiting times would reduce drastically, by pointing out what numbers to put into the controlling program and how to stop delays by putting in the manpower into action BEFORE the rush happened. Never after the rush happened.

My feeling was one of elation. This number crunching approach, after detailed and painstaking simulation, could apply to very many areas where there are shortages. Globally applied, inequalities could be resolved peacefully and efficiently.

Alas, that was not to be. Our labs were shut down. Too many people profited from controlled chaos, which made them important and indispensable.
Still, there are ruins to the whole thing, such as this old copy of the great books of this most wonderful science and scifi writer, Dr Isaac Asimov, to whom I owe a great deal in my professional career.

Cheers,
Arindam Banerjee