mem·o·ry·less·ness

petzoldt:

The “Traveling Sales Man Problem” is a classic in Operations Research. It asked for the shortest round trip through a set of cities given the distances beween them. For 20 cities there are already 2.432.902.008.176.640.000 of such tours. A computer able to calculate a trip length in A computer able to calculate a trip length in one milliseconds would still need 240 billion years checking all of them.

Its fascinating to see how researchers keep pushing the limits when solving ever larger problems using methods from mathematical optimization and Operations Research, such as William Cook who claims to have calculated the best tour visting 1.9 million cities.

Looking for upcoming sports tickets? http://seatgeek.com/ uses an algorithm to predict when to optimize your purchase.

(via INFORMS)

This is neat.  O.R. for the win, quite literally in the case of sports tickets.

Here’s an interesting paper by Gurvich et al. that’s in the current issue of Management Science.

Full paper here.