Last week, Antonio S. Chinchón made an interesting post showing how to create a traveling salesman portrait in R. Essentially, the idea is to sample a bunch of dark pixels in an image, solve the well-known traveling salesman problem for…
Tag: optimization
How many college football teams can you watch in-person in one football season?
The college football season once again came to an end back in January, which now leaves us college football fans with nothing to do but post football memes online and feign interest in other sports until August rolls around again.…
The Optimal U.S. National Parks Centennial Road Trip
In August 2016, the National Park Service celebrates their 100th year of managing the United States’ system of beautiful national parks. So what’s a better way to celebrate 100 years of stewardship than to visit all of the national parks…
Computing optimal road trips on a limited budget
About a year ago, I wrote an article introducing the concept of optimizing road trips using a combination of genetic algorithms and Google Maps. During that time, I’ve given some thought to how I could make that algorithm more useful…
Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, road trip, travel, traveling salesman problem
Optimized walking tours of New York City and Philadelphia
In the past couple weeks, I’ve shown you how to use machine learning to improve the efficiency of road trips all over the world, including the U.S., Europe, and South America. In this post, I’d like to show you how…
Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, traveling salesman problem, walking tour
Pure Michigan road trip, optimized
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been computing optimal road trips across the U.S. and Europe. This time, as a shout-out to my current home state, I made a road trip around Michigan. With the snow melting and a warm…
Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, road trip, traveling salesman problem
Computing the optimal road trip across South America
By popular request, I’ve created another follow-up to my posts about computing optimal road trips across the U.S. and Europe. This time, I made an optimal road trip around South America. If you’d like to get into the nitty-gritty of…
Computing the optimal road trip across Europe
As a follow-up to my post about computing optimal road trips across the U.S., I thought it’d be fun to make a road trip map for Europe as well. If you’d like to get into the nitty-gritty of how these…
Tagged with: Europe, genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, road trip, traveling salesman problem
Computing the optimal road trip across the U.S.
Last week, Tracy Staedter from Discovery News proposed an interesting idea to me: Why not use the same algorithm from my Where’s Waldo article to compute the optimal road trip across every state in the U.S.? Visiting every U.S. state…
Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, road trip, traveling salesman problem
Here’s Waldo: Computing the optimal search strategy for finding Waldo
As I found myself unexpectedly snowed in this weekend, I decided to take on a weekend project for fun. While searching for something to catch my fancy, I ran across an old Slate article claiming that they found a foolproof…
Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, traveling salesman problem, where's waldo
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