Eliud Kipchoge Breaks Two-Hour Marathon Barrier
So Kipchoge had rotating teams of pacemakers running _before_ him, throughout
the race. Each team was able to outrun Kipchoge for a short amount of time,
but of course Kipchoge himself had to keep the same pace throughout the race.This reminded me of an episode from Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. This is
mostly from memory, but he describes an invasion of the country Ephebe where
the invasion force comes from the side of a desert considered impassable,
because no expeditionary force could carry enough provisions to make it
through the desert. The trick is that a number of expeditions have preceded
the invasion whose function was to leave caches of provisions for the actual
invasion force to use. Each expedition only has to carry enough provisions to
make it to a cache location and back and of course multiple expeditions can
deposit provisions to the same cache location, until it is sufficiently
stocked for the invading force.It's a slow and costly process, but it gets the job done and it made me wonder
if there are algorithms like that, that can compute results otherwise
uncomputable. I'm pretty sure there are- in fact I'm pretty sure it's
something blindingly obvious that I'm missing because I'm thinking of it in
terms of runners and soldiers crossing deserts... Maybe divide and conquer
strategies, or dynamic programming?