We waited in line for two hours at the studios for a great movie ride outside in the sun.

And I remember thinking while I was in line that there's got to be a better way for people to tour parks without having these really long waits in line. Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the DCL Duo podcast.

And tonight, I don't think we can be any more excited than we are about our guests.

He is, in no small measure, a bit of a Disney celebrity. His name is

well known throughout the Disney community. He is the, I'm going to call him the founder, or at least

the co-founder, if not the founder of touring plans, and also the co-author of several of the

Disney unofficial guidebooks. So we want to welcome Lynn Testa to the show.

Welcome, Lynn.

Thanks for having me.

Hey, Sam. Yeah, thanks for coming, Len. We're so excited to talk to you today. I'm super excited to be here. When we normally start with folks as sort of Disney background, but there is a component of your Disney history that I sort of have read specifically that I thought we could kind of key off of, which is, my understanding is you wrote your, your, was it your master's or

your doctoral thesis essentially is sort of the

foundation of where touring plans started. And so how did you decide to study Disney or study

theme parks? Like, where did that come from? So it was my master's thesis. Yeah, the summer before I went to graduate school, I went to Walt Disney World with my twin

sister.

And we waited in line for two hours at the studios for great movie ride outside in the sun.

And I remember thinking while I was in line that there's got to be a better way for people

to tour parks without having these really long waits in line. I was absolutely fine with waiting in the line if I knew that that was the best I could do. When graduate school started in the fall, I went to my advisors and I said, here's what I want to do. I want to write a computer program where you tell it the rides you want to ride in Walt Disney World. And it tells you the order in which you should ride those rides to minimize your weight in line. And it turns out that that's a super complicated scheduling problem. It's one of the fundamental problems in math and computer science. It even has its own name. It's called the traveling salesman problem. So I studied the time dependent version of that because the time that you wait in line obviously depends

on when in the day you go to the rides. And that's an even harder version of the traveling

salesmen problems. My master's thesis expanded on the PhD dissertation of the lead research

scientist at UPS. We'd also study the same problem. Obviously, UPS is super interested in those

kind of problems because if you imagine like you're delivering packages, so you're the delivery driver, the rides you want to ride or the customers you have to visit and the weights and the line at rides is the travel time between customers. Basically the same problem. So package delivery companies are also super interested in that. Yeah, so that was a that was my two year master's thesis. At the end of it, the school actually patented my research, which was super interesting. One of the things I did during the thesis was a creative website where people could test this out, where you could actually pick rides from a list in the Magic Kingdom, and it would tell you, you know, basically optimize the schedule for you using the code that I was working on for my thesis. It's interesting your traveling salesman problem. My son and I were actually watching a show.

I think it was a David Pogue from the New York Times who was kind of going through this problem with UPS. And he designed his own route, the computer designed a route, and then they set them to work to see who could do it faster. Really? It was just like I had heard of the problem, but it was fascinating to sort of see it kind of in that real world time frame.

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