In the traveling salesman problem (TSP), a salesman must minimize travel distance while visiting each of a given set of cities exactly once. Recently, the TSP has generated some buzz in the popular media, after a blog post by Randy Olson. The tour shown was not quite optimal, and Bill
Peg solitaire I love puzzles; I have a few of them in my office. I regularly use them at interviews: I ask the candidate either to solve a puzzle or to devise a (clever) mathematical algorithm that solves it. I'm sure a lot of readers are familiar with the standard
Suppose someone needs a kidney transplant and a family member is willing to donate one. If the donor and recipient are incompatible (because of blood types, tissue mismatch, and so on), the transplant cannot happen. Now suppose two donor-recipient pairs A and B are in this situation, but donor A
Just yesterday, Santa called my cell phone asking for a favor... Yes, Santa has my direct line, and I owe him (he once did me a solid, back in 1984, for Christmas, scoring me an awesome Optimus Prime Transformer). That's me there in the front - sporting plaid duds and
Do you have an Uncle Louie? Yep - we all do! You know what I mean - this guy: When my wife and I were planning to get married, we had all sorts of big decisions to make. Where would our future home be? How many kids would we have?
