The Serendipity Engine is the focus of the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Last Bus to Serendip, which airs tomorrow - Thursday 5 September - at 9am.
Digital Human producer Peter McManus and I took the Engine on the road, asking some of the brightest minds in the serendipity universe across the country to help me achieve the unachievable: to create an engine that accurately predicts a happy accident.
Along the way, we meet an Iranian scholar who tells us about an ancient serendipity engine created by the poet Hafez. We bump into an Olympic poet in the London Library. We stumble across a mythogeographer in Exeter. We track down a psychologist of luck. I check in with my serendipity guru, a web researcher from MIT. And I have a delightful cup of tea with the man who knows everything about Connections - science communicator James Burke. And the Engine managed to get the attention of a few men and women on the street, who kindly offered their own ingredients to the recipe.
The Last Bus to Serendip airs tomorrow morning at 9am London time on BBC Radio 4, and again at 9:30pm tomorrow night.