Kirkpatrick’s friend and IBM colleague Dan Gelatt was fascinated by the problem, and quickly hooked Kirkpatrick, who had a flash of insight. “The way to study [physical systems] was to warm them up then cool them down, and let the system organize itself. From that background, it seemed like a perfectly natural thing to treat all kinds of optimization problems as if the degrees of freedom that you were trying to organize were little atoms, or spins, or what have you.”
