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For example, at an air operator company, if you can calculate optimal schedule of plane flights so you fly as least miles as possible, you can make millions dai
by emteycz 6y ago
For example, at an air operator company, if you can calculate optimal schedule of plane flights so you fly as least miles as possible, you can make millions daily.
- tyingq 6y agoRight, but it's not possible now, is it?
- emteycz 6y agoDownscaled version is possible with the quantum computers of today, if that's what you mean. Optimization is done today - manually.
- tialaramex 6y agoThis is a travelling salesman problem. It's true that a conventional computer cannot truly solve this problem for large size inputs because it is NP-hard. Whether the inputs for an actual scheduled aviation company are large enough to make this important I somewhat doubt, but regardless: We have good heuristics for this problem which are very close to the likely best solution. So instead of an amazing pay off for a true solution you get in fact only a slight improvement or worse in some cases merely confirmation that your existing heuristic answer was actually the best possible.
- emteycz 6y agoCould you please point me to some of these alternative solutions?
- chorsestudios 6y agoClassical computers might not find the optimal schedule but can likely solve for good enough scheduling for a fraction of the price. I’m curious if the difference would result in millions daily for a single air operator company
- s1dev 6y agoQuantum computers don’t have such a compelling case for optimization. Classical optimization algorithms are really good. Usually if you look hard enough you can find a sqrt(n) speed up but I don’t think these are the applications that will change the world