Researchers Discover the Optimal Way To Optimize
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In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at the University of California, Berkeley, George Dantzig — a first-year graduate student — copied two problems off the blackboard, thinking they were a homework assignment. He found the homework “harder to do than usual,” he would later recount, and apologized to the professor for taking some extra days to complete it. A few weeks later, his professor told him that he had solved two famous open problems in statistics. Dantzig’s work would provide the basis for his doctoral dissertation and, decades later, inspiration for the film Good Will Hunting.
Dantzig received his doctorate in 1946, just after World War II, and he soon became a mathematical adviser to the newly formed U.S. Air Force. As with all modern wars, World War II’s outcome depended on the prudent allocation of limited resources. But unlike previous wars, this conflict was truly global in scale, and it was won in large part through sheer industrial might. The U.S. could simply produce more tanks, aircraft carriers and bombers than its enemies. Knowing this, the military was intensely interested in optimization problems — that is, how to strategically allocate limited resources in situations that could involve hundreds or thousands of variables.
Researchers Discover the Optimal Way To Optimize | Quanta Magazine
The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better.
Quanta Magazine (www.quantamagazine.org)
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S Science shared this topic on
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In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at the University of California, Berkeley, George Dantzig — a first-year graduate student — copied two problems off the blackboard, thinking they were a homework assignment. He found the homework “harder to do than usual,” he would later recount, and apologized to the professor for taking some extra days to complete it. A few weeks later, his professor told him that he had solved two famous open problems in statistics. Dantzig’s work would provide the basis for his doctoral dissertation and, decades later, inspiration for the film Good Will Hunting.
Dantzig received his doctorate in 1946, just after World War II, and he soon became a mathematical adviser to the newly formed U.S. Air Force. As with all modern wars, World War II’s outcome depended on the prudent allocation of limited resources. But unlike previous wars, this conflict was truly global in scale, and it was won in large part through sheer industrial might. The U.S. could simply produce more tanks, aircraft carriers and bombers than its enemies. Knowing this, the military was intensely interested in optimization problems — that is, how to strategically allocate limited resources in situations that could involve hundreds or thousands of variables.
Researchers Discover the Optimal Way To Optimize | Quanta Magazine
The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better.
Quanta Magazine (www.quantamagazine.org)
Cool, but admit it, you shared it (and I read it) because of that title that someone had way too much fun writing.
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Cool, but admit it, you shared it (and I read it) because of that title that someone had way too much fun writing.
No, I can spot bait.
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In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at the University of California, Berkeley, George Dantzig — a first-year graduate student — copied two problems off the blackboard, thinking they were a homework assignment. He found the homework “harder to do than usual,” he would later recount, and apologized to the professor for taking some extra days to complete it. A few weeks later, his professor told him that he had solved two famous open problems in statistics. Dantzig’s work would provide the basis for his doctoral dissertation and, decades later, inspiration for the film Good Will Hunting.
Dantzig received his doctorate in 1946, just after World War II, and he soon became a mathematical adviser to the newly formed U.S. Air Force. As with all modern wars, World War II’s outcome depended on the prudent allocation of limited resources. But unlike previous wars, this conflict was truly global in scale, and it was won in large part through sheer industrial might. The U.S. could simply produce more tanks, aircraft carriers and bombers than its enemies. Knowing this, the military was intensely interested in optimization problems — that is, how to strategically allocate limited resources in situations that could involve hundreds or thousands of variables.
Researchers Discover the Optimal Way To Optimize | Quanta Magazine
The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better.
Quanta Magazine (www.quantamagazine.org)
To give some detail they didn’t, the researchers designed an algorithm that’s as good as possible using the specific approach they used. I was all excited someone had finally designed a provably polynomial pivot rule. This is a more modest step forwards, and depends among other things on a small amount of random noise being added to the problem definition.
