Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 188 posts

Re: Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

#101

Post by dvirsky »

pkaye wrote: post #90
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #84

> able to subtract 0.2 billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent ... > “This is a result I have wanted all my career,” said David Williamson of Cornell University, who has been studying the traveling salesperson problem since the 1980s I love this. Oh to be a theoretician. Here's hoping for a flood of further improvements.

Meanwhile in an agile dev team.... "can you optimize it in the next sprint?"

"Well, let's not risk going live with the new version for such a small improvement. You know, premature optimizations are the root of all evil!"

Re: Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

#102

Post by nefitty »

lurquer wrote: post #89
nefitty wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally imagined a man in a 50’s style suit with a briefcase and wouldn’t have given it a second thought. I had to manually untangle that concept to add the realization that women can sell stuff too. Maybe it has an effect on behavior? I’m not sure of any research behind gendered language.

Traveling Avon Lady?

Mental model updated

Re: Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

#103

Post by LeoPanthera »

Brushfire wrote: post #98
LeoPanthera wrote: post #52

This is kind of a hijack, but it's at least related: Are there any websites/apps that can approximate a solution for road destinations in the real world? For example, given a list of cities, an approximate solution on actual roads to visit all of them once?

https://routific.com/

Yeah this is not what I meant at all. I'm looking for something that me, a normal boring non-tech end user can use.

Re: Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

#104

Post by jk700 »

dang wrote: post #64
growlist wrote: post #2

Whilst I'm thrilled that the monstrous partriachal injustice of the name of a mathematical problem including 'man' rather than 'person' has been annihilated, I'm also concerned about the extra co2 emissions generated by the data transfer associated with those three extra letters.

We've banned this account for taking HN threads repeatedly into gender flamewar, and other kinds of flamewar, and ignoring our many requests to stop—such as this explanation from just two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569144 . Vandalizing HN like this is not cool.

Except maybe for current comment (not really, HN just has more replies on anything these days), nothing actually turned into flamewars, most out of his few "flamewar" comments over many months barely had any replies at all and were just flagged. It seems you are labeling them as flamewar just so you could justify banning him. Possibly because he expressed opinions you consider "politically incorrect" today and you want to suppress such opinions on HN.

Also you can't claim he ignored your many requests to stop, because you never made a single request to stop what can be interpreted the same way by both of you, he probably thought he followed them. Again, you were using this as manufactured justification to ban him.

Re: Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

#105

Post by jonbaer »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #52

This is kind of a hijack, but it's at least related: Are there any websites/apps that can approximate a solution for road destinations in the real world? For example, given a list of cities, an approximate solution on actual roads to visit all of them once?

OR-Tools, https://developers.google.com/optimization/routing/tsp

Re: Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

#106

Post by FartyMcFarter »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #83
teknopurge wrote: post #79

It looks like it's predicated on an assumption that "nodes with odd numbers of edges have short edges." It's novel, but not reliable. I do love the breakdown and effort though - very useful.

> It's novel, but not reliable. Isn't that really the best we can hope for? It's an NP-complete problem, but we can still realistically hope that researchers might discover efficient algorithms for solving subsets of the problem space, hopefully broad subsets. If we get to the point that 90% of travelling salesman problems can be solved quickly, and the remaining 10% can quickly be approximately solved (to within 5%…

> It's an NP-complete problem

Finding the optimal solution is NP-complete, but approximations are not necessarily so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem#Co...

Re: Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

#108

Post by mattigames »

jfengel wrote: post #80
echelon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still confused whether it's appropriate to refer to actresses as "actor". The guidance appears to be skewed. (I'm being completely earnest here - I don't want to offend anyone.)

You may always refer to a female actor as an "actor". The term "actress" is slowly fading, but it won't disappear for quite some time, especially as long as the Oscars continue to use "actress" for their categories.

It will never disappear, unless it's replaced by "female actor", whatever incarnation of the word it has an utilitarian purpose by having more information in a single word, "Who is the actress on that movie we just saw?" Same questing without gender would always get asked back "the man or the woman?".

Re: Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

#109

Post by mattigames »

jfk13 wrote: post #87
Grustaf wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sex is not very important for a doctor, for an actor is pretty much defines what roles you can play.

Shakespeare might like a word... (Alternatively: then why don't we have separate words for black actors, white actors, native American actors, south-east Asian actors, transgender actors, and so on?)

So the path forward is to use "male actors" and "female actors" instead of actors and actresses? Doesn't appear to be a net positive for society, is just making them longer to write and pronounce.

Re: Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

#110

Post by rsynnott »

Grustaf wrote: post #74
Jabbles wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not inappropriate to use "actress" yet. But consider that we used to have the word "doctoress" to refer to a female doctor. Using that feels weird.

Sex is not very important for a doctor, for an actor is pretty much defines what roles you can play.

So does height, in that if you’re 5’6 you won’t manage a very convincing Lincoln. But it’s not generally worked into the job name.
Post reply on HN