Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. My father turned 82 this past year and he lives in Arizona near Phoenix.

And every Christmas holiday we go there to spend some time with him. But every year new decisions have to be made.

Are we going to fly or are we going to drive? It's about an eight hour drive and we have to

look at how much time do we have to get there and how expensive all the flights.

And then there's a question of where do we stay?

He's older now so it's a little bit harder to stay with him.

And then there's a question of how long do we stay and when do we

leave. There's just a lot of decisions that have to be made and every year I work on it,

come up with those decisions and we go visit my father.

But if I stand back and look at it, there's really one decision to be made

which is, I'm going to go see my father,

and then based upon that decision,

everything else has to fall in place.

But the main decision of going to see my father is the main thing and because I make this decision

everything else has to follow so it all fits together and works out well.

So there's the thing I want to solve which is going to see my father at Christmas time and

then there's all the steps that get there, the solution of how to do that.

So I don't know if you've heard of this term but it's called an algorithm and it's a mathematical

term and what it means is it's a process or set of rules to be

followed in calculations or other problem solving operations or basically rules to how to solve a problem. For example, let's say we want to

know the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius, and there are ways very effective ways of doing this. In a

similar way, every year I have to come up with an algorithm of what I'm going to do in

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