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I built an AI company to save my open source project

timefold.ai

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Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#71

Post by ge0ffrey »

BossingAround wrote: post #69

Honestly, I'm still not sure how I feel about Red Hat/IBM's journey. On one hand, RH killed (i.e. "gave to IBM to rot away") a lot of products I liked (recently, the whole JBoss stack they had, see [1] for more details). On the other hand, a lot of the products that RH gave to IBM were really painful to use. Let me preface this by saying that I mean no disrespect to Geoffrey and his amazing work! And, also, I suspect…

Our goal is to make planning optimization easy. But planning optimization can be extremely complex. So it took us quite some time to make it easy. Timefold Solver is already a lot easier than OptaPlanner to use. And the Timefold REST APIs are even easier: if you have a vehicle routing or shift scheduling case on your hands, just send in your data and get the solution. But not all cases are easy...

What kind of use case where you trying to solve with OptaPlanner? In the past, I've seen a strong correlation between the ease of solving the problem and the availability of of a quickstart example.

For example, our tech is even used for court scheduling (in different countries), but every single one of those cases was difficult. Other cases are far more simple.

It all depends on the planning problem.

Do you remember any particular pain in your OptaPlanner experience that we can improve going forward? Around which year was this?

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#72

Post by matt-p »

menaerus wrote: post #66
matt-p wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, agreed though a larger percentage of VC funded startups exit than you probably think. Those "90% fail" stats are made up mostly by people who got traditional angel investment or no investment at all. I'm just saying there's two sides to the coin, that's all. I think there's a very genuine element of 'show me how motivated you are' you also cannot expect to get a normal standard rate company salary when you own…

No, that's only about the leverage - a perfect instrument to create even more pressure. Everything else I call a BS, sorry. Aren't founders already taking a huge leap by admitting themselves to work probably as much as ~10x more, with of course reciprocal amount of stress, and then you say it's reasonable that founders wouldn't be motivated enough unless they did all of that but for under the market rate? They left t…

Pretty much all investments work this way. I'm not saying they are on the poverty line - let's say in the UK, standard rate for a great full time programmer or average tech lead is 100k, as a co-founder you'd be earning say 50k (pre profit). You can pay your bills, even go on vacation but yes, not market rate.

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#73

Post by aitchnyu »

ge0ffrey wrote: post #47
aitchnyu wrote: post #15

Whats the name of the algorithm/concept used here? I used simulated annealing, old fashioned algorithm for a college timetable prototype and I'm wondering how this company is using an AI model.

We support Simulated Annealing too, as well as Tabu Search and many others. By default Timefold Solver uses Late Acceptance, which behaves like Simulated Annealing but isn't parameter tuning fickle like SA. Do note that the base algorithm (such as SA, TS or LA) is less than 5% of the work to get great results. We do a lot of additional things on top of that (incremental score calculation, smart neighborhood selection…

Hey Geoffrey, I missed that you were behind this! You did help me choose Drools Planner with simulated annealing in 2012. Congrats on coming a long way since then!

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8712955/which-drools-pro...

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#74

Post by tomrod »

sa46 wrote: post #14
chime wrote: post #6

I haven’t tried Timefold but did try a ton of solvers (local and web) a few years ago when trying to optimize MRP schedule. One of the hardest parts was converting my business logic into constraints, especially date based calculations. Instead of explicit constraints, is there a way to provide a calculation that can be minmaxed? If every order has a due date, can I say +/- 3 days = 0, 7 early = 9999 (not allowed), 7+…

Somewhat related, I looked at a bunch of solvers for vehicle routing with time windows. One thing that surprised me was that the SaaS-based distance matrix calculations were prohibitively expensive. Google charged $0.01 per matrix element. How do folks normally get the distance matrix? I ended up just using the Mapbox Optimization API instead of using a solver.

I've had to solve this in a number of ways. The fastest I've found is to precompute a hash map at a low-granularity (well, update on batch cycle regularly). Graphhopper with OSRM + OpenStreetMap data are useful in this domain, to the point where relatively dense polygons can be mapped on 16 CPU hours in a 100km by 100km block.

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#75

Post by menaerus »

matt-p wrote: post #72
menaerus wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's only about the leverage - a perfect instrument to create even more pressure. Everything else I call a BS, sorry. Aren't founders already taking a huge leap by admitting themselves to work probably as much as ~10x more, with of course reciprocal amount of stress, and then you say it's reasonable that founders wouldn't be motivated enough unless they did all of that but for under the market rate? They left t…

Pretty much all investments work this way. I'm not saying they are on the poverty line - let's say in the UK, standard rate for a great full time programmer or average tech lead is 100k, as a co-founder you'd be earning say 50k (pre profit). You can pay your bills, even go on vacation but yes, not market rate.

I appreciate the details, I am not familiar with this at all. This is pretty shitty considering that as a contractor you would need to work ~3.5 months to earn 50k for much much less work and stress.

That makes me wonder what is the profile of a startup founder who agrees to an infinitely larger amount of complexity and stress for ~4x less income? The ones that got lucky so they don't care or don't have much loose or what. Crazy.

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#77

Post by axus »

I didn't have much appreciation for shift planning until an engineering genius showed me the beautifully crafted schedule for their company (after I helped mess it up with some 12 hour days). They later went independent, with shift-planning software being one of their products.

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#78

Post by freethejazz »

Thanks for your work and dedication on this problem domain, Geoffrey! I’ve used optaplanner in the past on several projects and will certainly use Timefold for future projects. This sort of constrain solver is an invaluable tool when you find yourself in the problem space and definitely worth the learning curve.

Re: I built an AI company to save my open source project

#79

Post by karussell »

sa46 wrote: post #14
chime wrote: post #6

I haven’t tried Timefold but did try a ton of solvers (local and web) a few years ago when trying to optimize MRP schedule. One of the hardest parts was converting my business logic into constraints, especially date based calculations. Instead of explicit constraints, is there a way to provide a calculation that can be minmaxed? If every order has a due date, can I say +/- 3 days = 0, 7 early = 9999 (not allowed), 7+…

Somewhat related, I looked at a bunch of solvers for vehicle routing with time windows. One thing that surprised me was that the SaaS-based distance matrix calculations were prohibitively expensive. Google charged $0.01 per matrix element. How do folks normally get the distance matrix? I ended up just using the Mapbox Optimization API instead of using a solver.

The GraphHopper Matrix API has an (IMO) attractive pricing especially for large matrices. The pricing is credit based and for large matrices we do not charge for every matrix cell but instead we only charge "locations*10". E.g. for a 200x200 matrix we only charge 2000 and not 40 000 credits as our underlying algorithm is very efficient (scales nearly linear). And let's say you need this calculation 25 times a day (using the premium package) then this leads to $0.016 for 1000 matrix elements. Of course even cheaper for larger matrices.

And larger packages will furthermore include a volume discount.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.

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