From being drafted into the military during the Vietnam war to solving the so-called hard problem of consciousness, from playing in chess tournaments to working on space robots for interplanetary spacecraft, from attending public schools in John Steinbeck's hometown to teaching computer science at a major university, from riding the big surf at Waimea Bay to inventing the world's fastest sorting algorithm, from racing model cars as a teenager to mentoring teenagers on high school robotics teams: Dr. Wagner's debut book, twenty years in the making, chronicles his struggle to live meaningfully in a quest for a coherent understanding of the human condition.
