A month or so ago, I had a meandering post about Burkard’s and my troubadour travels: Travelling Salesmen, Rainbow and the Value of Idiotic Effort. The post was, in part, about the value of rolling the dice, of meeting people about whom one knows next to nothing. When writing the post I had in mind a lovely person I had met in such a manner through the blog, earlier this year. We then happened to meet again soon after the Rainbow post, when she good-naturedly accused me of “clickbait”: she is an undergraduate, had just heard about the travelling salesman problem and felt short-changed by the absence of the problem in the post. So, to make minor amends, and without attempting to deny that pretty much all my titles are clickbait, here is a follow-up post with a little travelling salesman in it.
I had intended to include a couple travelling salesmen references in the Rainbow post but in the end they didn’t seem to fit, and all that was left was the graphic, above. Minus the purple dot, the graphic is from an Age column Burkard and I wrote on the travelling salesman problem, including a simple and very nice non-solution to the problem. As it happened that column appeared soon after the trip to Rainbow, and my Rainbow host – the guy who took his Year 9s to shearing school on Tuesdays – rightly scolded me for not including Rainbow on our tour map.
The second intended reference was to a real, live travelling salesman problem I encountered a few years ago, when I found myself with a couple hundred mathematics texts in need of homes. Having found the homes, the problem was then to get the books to the homes. Interstate stuff was mailed, but there were a dozen or so bags to get to a dozen or so Melbourne addresses.
In what seemed to me the “logical” solution, I plotted the destinations, eyeballed the shortest loop, loaded up my car, and spent a day driving around Melbourne delivering books to (mostly) then-strangers. It was a very stupid, and very fun and very rewarding thing to do.
So, there it is, the missing TSP stuff. Nothing to write home about, but at least I have silenced the accusations of clickbaiting. Until the next post.
I think I can see my old address on the map! Can confirm that I had great fun with them, and after heading overseas they’ve now found new homes too!
Great to hear from you, Yossi, and , yes, your old apartment is there (approx). Lovely to hear that the books found new new homes.