Thanks for the paper Daniel. Very easy to read and understand.
I believe I might have found a minor typo that made me scratch my head for a second. On page 3 in the part where you describe the "follow pointers" part of the algorithm you wrote vi=sj and then cpi=csj whereas I believe you meant cvi=csj and that we can now replace vi with csj to make it cvi. Let me know if I'm misunderstanding something here.
At the time, i needed academic affiliation, meaning be in college or more likely have a professor vouch for me. What i ended up doing was return to Stanford undergrad n take classes related to algorithms, show my algorithm portfolio in office hours, then get referred to other profs, one of them being Jeffrey Ullman, in 2019. N then after emails back n forth we met in person in the Gates building, it went from there.