That makes sense to me. Kilpatrick's simulated annealing paper was published in Science in 1983, so he could have run across the term while browsing through iss

That makes sense to me. Kilpatrick's simulated annealing paper was published in Science in 1983, so he could have run across the term while browsing through issues of Science. (Another theory is that he might have spotted various computer science talks at UBC when he was taking the creative writing course and decided to sit in on some as fodder for his fiction.)