How we made galaxy routing blazingly fast — the honest ledger, in four chapters. One number ties them together: the wall-clock time to plot Wongi → Colonia, which starts at 7.5 seconds and ends somewhere you should read for yourself. The trophies are real because the graveyard is bigger.
In which 199 million stars meet a 7.5-second plot, we build the timers and the synthetic galaxy before touching the search, and the fastest code turns out to be the code that stops waiting.
COLONIA CLOCK · 7.5 s → 951 ms chapter 02In which our proudest idea dies on contact with the real galaxy, reverse planning dies twice, meeting in the middle wins the week, and a buried heuristic climbs out of its grave with receipts.
COLONIA CLOCK · 951 ms → 732 ms · the impossible cell completes chapter 03In which the density map grows a suspicious cross, we nearly file a bug against the Milky Way itself, greed becomes a navigation strategy with one caveat, and Spansh humbles us in public.
THE GALAXY ITSELF IS THE BUG chapter 04In which the machine is wrong, the human is also wrong, everyone is wrong at different times about different things, and the scoreboard survives anyway. Interactive bench table included; argue with it yourself.
WHEELS DOWN · THE SCOREBOARD