John’s interview caused a massive stir.
[New York Mayor Directly Criticizes Boston. “Patrick is a hypocrite.”]
Political experts assessed John’s remarks as follows.
“That interview wasn’t given without reason.
It was intended to suppress early public opinion that saw Patrick as the next candidate for mayor of New York.
At the same time, by publicly declaring the recruitment of MIT and Yu Seoha, he was likely trying to shake off the frame that he lacked execution.”
The broadcaster added that “if Mayor John’s remarks are true, a reassessment of the credit for the Boston Project will be inevitable.”
[Patrick’s Side Refuses Official Comment. City Hall in Uproar.]
-Boston City Hall has fallen into extreme confusion after the New York mayor’s bombshell remarks yesterday.
At a press conference, Mayor John claimed that “Mayor Patrick contributed nothing to the traffic reform” and disclosed detailed information based on internal documents as evidence.
The problem was that this information came from confidential files accessible only to high-ranking City Hall officials.
A Boston city executive who requested anonymity told this paper the following.
“Only five people had access to those documents. It’s clear an insider leaked them.”
Another official described the current situation as “a state of emergency.”
“The mayor’s office has been turned upside down.
Mayor Patrick feels an extreme sense of betrayal and is showing his determination to find the leaker no matter what.”
[Political Commentators: “Boston’s Political Scene Will Be Badly Shaken”]
└Wow... At this point, isn’t it just all-out war?
└Not all-out war, just getting beaten one-sidedly. Karma, maybe? Patrick did keep needling the New York mayor.
└The media worshiping Patrick like a hero was way too much. It was uncomfortable to watch.
└So the MIT researcher was real. Yu Seoha?
└Has politics ever been this fun? lololol
└Why did John suddenly draw his sword? Public opinion must have been really dangerous, huh?
└I’m someone involved, and it’s true Patrick cut the budget. There was a lot of talk internally too.
└I don’t care who does it, I just hope someone does something about New York traffic.
Bang—
Jake hurriedly opened the door to the mayor’s office and came in.
“Mayor, the response is incredible.
The political channels keep replaying only your interview. Community reactions are split about half and half, but the important thing is that more people are viewing your ability to take action favorably.”
John smiled faintly as he read the report.
“This should be enough. Send out the article.”
John was a skilled politician.
If he hadn’t been, he would never have become mayor of New York in the first place.
“Yes, sir!”
Jake distributed the materials prepared for today to the press all at once.
[We Have Chosen the Best Team for New York’s Future.]
-New York City officially announced this morning that it has signed a formal contract with MIT research team Team Apex for a complete overhaul of the city’s traffic signal system.
Mayor John stated the following in his announcement.
“Yu Seoha of MIT has designed the most sophisticated and outstanding algorithm among existing traffic infrastructure models.
New York now has the chance to discard its outdated system and draw out the city’s potential to the fullest.
The world’s greatest software will be added to the future-oriented urban framework created by Gouverneur Morris and Simeon De Witt in 1811.
I hereby declare.
Because of this decision, the center of twenty-first-century urban innovation will return to New York once again.”
A City Hall official stated that starting this week, Team Apex, led by Yu Seoha, would begin analyzing seven years’ worth of real-time traffic data collected across New York.
└Wow! I thought it was all talk, but John actually pulled it off.
└Who is Yu Seoha?
└Owner of an insane brain? There are more than a few testimonies saying he’s not in his right mind.
└Seoha! Do something about Seoul too. I don’t want to spend three hours a day commuting!
└I’m Korean too, but maybe go take a look at the budget being poured into this project?
└In my opinion, New York is impossible to solve. It’s just too many people on too little land, so how do you fix that? Unless you’re going to move them all out.
Yu Seoha,
a fifteen-year-old genius mathematician who now had to solve the traffic problems of the world’s largest city.
Many people’s eyes were focused on him.
* * *
Six in the morning.
Even at an hour when the lights in the surrounding buildings had all gone out, there was one building shining like a lighthouse standing tall in the middle of a city of darkness.
The New York City Department of Transportation had dispatched a large number of personnel to MIT. They set up headquarters in the shared research area between Buildings 2 and 4 and began research in earnest.
Dozens of screens, maps displaying New York’s grid-patterned roads in real time, black screens where algorithmic code scrolled endlessly upward.
At the center of that place sat one boy.
“Data has begun coming in from the New York City servers!”
Someone shouted.
Seoha’s eyes turned toward the real-time data stream.
Vehicle flow, pedestrian patterns, weather changes, accident location statistics—all of the information was flowing into the lab’s servers.
Seoha nodded as he looked at the screen.
“Good. Now, shall we see for ourselves what kind of city New York is?”
A population thirteen times that of Boston.
An area seven times larger.
A traffic network at least twenty times more complex.
A wave of data, so enormous it could not even be compared to before, swept over the laboratory.
The Boston Project had been sufficiently handled with 5.6 billion sampling data points, but New York surpassed 10 billion within just ten minutes of the first stream coming in.
“Huh? This is going to get pretty complicated, isn’t it?”
When Seoha muttered, Theo and Sri, who were beside him, flinched.
Having been entrusted with full authority over the project, Seoha decided to design an ideal system for this city.
Seoha rose from his seat.
“Everyone, please gather in the conference room.”
The people in the laboratory began moving busily.
Engineers dispatched from New York, MIT’s theoretical mathematics team recruited separately for the project, the data analysis team, simulation engineers, and even aide Jake, who was attending for reporting purposes.
More than forty elite personnel filled every seat at the tables in the large conference room.
Seoha stood in the middle of the room.
He was younger than anyone there, but Seoha possessed an overwhelming presence that emanated from the achievements he had accumulated so far.
Seoha slowly looked around the conference room.
“Good. I’ve grasped New York’s data to some extent now.”
Seoha pointed at the screen where data was streaming in.
“Based on this, the conclusion I’ve reached is...”
Gulp.
What kind of work would they be doing from now on?
Everyone’s expressions were mixed with tension and curiosity.
“My opinion is that the model we used in Boston can also be sufficiently applied to New York.”
“Phew.”
“What a relief.”
“Seriously. I was so worried we’d have to start from scratch.”
“The system we built back then was extremely complete, after all.”
Voices of relief came from here and there.
Most of them were researchers who had worked together on the Boston Project.
“However!”
Seoha raised his index finger, drawing the team members’ attention.
“Only in a single sector.”
Beep—
At Seoha’s signal, Theo clicked the mouse button.
A map of New York different from the one they had seen earlier appeared on the screen.
Beep-beep-beep—
When the mouse was clicked once more, lines were drawn vertically and horizontally, dividing the map into sections.
Forty in total.
“...”
“...”
The conference room fell silent.
Everyone stared at the screen as if bewitched.
Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, even Staten Island. New York had been divided into forty large pieces like an enormous puzzle.
Lisa, a data engineer from MIT, quietly raised her hand.
“Did you make Manhattan like that while taking density into account?”
“Yes!”
Seoha nodded.
From Washington Heights to Midtown, around Central Park, Downtown, and the extremely congested Lower Manhattan. Seoha had drawn precise boundaries while considering density, flow changes, and even terrain.
“You can think of Manhattan as containing ten systems like the one in Boston.”
An engineer dispatched from New York muttered in a trembling voice.
“One piece of that is the same as all of Boston?”
“That’s right. In particular, sectors 5 and 6 in southern Manhattan are about 1.4 times the size of Boston.”
A small gasp escaped from the back of the conference room.
“Then will these forty sectors each operate with independent algorithms?”
Seoha shook his head.
“In terms of population, scale, traffic—everything—Boston was a predictable city. But New York isn’t. If we designed that kind of model, it wouldn’t last even ten minutes.
New York’s traffic congestion has already exceeded the critical point.”
In Boston, every variable could be controlled with a single function.
Because information could be processed to derive the optimal solution. But Seoha concluded that New York was a city where no correct answer existed.
“New York isn’t a function. It’s interaction itself.”
A one-dimensional exchange of information based on sensors could not handle all of this.
“Therefore, we’re going to turn every intersection in New York into an AI node. Forty distributed brains will receive and process them.”
Sri raised her hand.
“There won’t be a central control system?”
“Each local agent will make judgments, but the central system will be structured to intervene only in emergencies or abnormal situations.
You could call it a kind of ‘Meta AI’—a higher-concept AI for control, coordination, and monitoring.”
Thousands of intersection AI nodes and forty sector AIs.
In order to make them cooperate, they needed a coordinator capable of balancing the entire network.
The brain that would silently rule New York in the future—Seoha intended to create it.
“W-wait!”
As if realizing something, Theo’s face turned pale.
“Then who’s going to design the forty sector AIs?”
Even with references, organizing the algorithms, establishing the formulas, experimenting, verifying, optimizing, and designing policy—normally, creating just one such AI required dozens of researchers to cling to it for months.
But what New York needed right now was...
“Wait, we’re making all forty separately?”
“Wouldn’t we have to? The data distribution is different for every sector.”
“Is this really work on a feasible scale?”
Seoha looked at them and smiled brightly.
“That, of course, is work all of you will have to do! I plan to focus on building the brain.”
The air in the conference room froze in an instant.
Everyone looked at Seoha with expressions that seemed to say, “He’s joking, right?” but there was not even a shred of playfulness to be found on his face.
“Then I’ll be counting on you!”
Seoha bowed politely, then left the conference room.
Click!
The sound of the door closing seemed unusually loud.
“...”
“...”
For a while, no one could open their mouth.
But as befitted seasoned researchers, they quickly came to their senses and began dividing up what had to be done.
“Let’s look at the references first.”
“The math team, please start by reworking the core equations the team leader created into a form that’s as ‘humanly understandable’ as possible. Those who aren’t confident in math, please begin organizing the variable lists by sector.”
The project began to move.
Theo attached himself to the math team, and Sri to the tech team.
When Theodore beckoned, doctoral students and postdocs from the mathematics department gathered in a rush to one side.
From one to two, from two to three; they ran out of whiteboards and had to borrow more several times. Sighs erupted here and there, but because it was a major project the entire world was watching, no one dropped out.
Like that, a month passed, and the publication day of The New York Times Magazine arrived.
Pedestrians passing through the streets looked at the newsstands with curious eyes.
The person adorning the cover of this heavyweight weekly magazine, published every Sunday, was neither a politician nor the CEO of a major corporation.
‘THE ARCHITECT’
-A fifteen-year-old boy designing the brain of New York traffic. Can he truly change the reality of New York, which has become one enormous parking lot?
A figure sitting on the window frame of a high-rise building, looking down at the night view.
Outside the window, the downtown line of New York could be seen, with red brake lights stretching endlessly.
New York—no, the world—was now waiting only for the moment one boy’s calculations came to an end.