Most of the researchers at DERI are dealing with rather virtual things such as models, concepts, or web services. But yesterday I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of how real-world research works. Edward demonstrated that the "shortest path" problem in a graph can be approached by examining the behaviour of a wind-up toy car. There seems to be a direct relation between the number of attempts the car needed to reach the end of the office and the shortest way from one point to the other..