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Part III In the end, it's super important to be the guy who OWNS a business and SELLS the results. E.g., for optimization, maybe develop the software for free

• amhey 13y ago
  graycat - remember this is a 7-week course and the lecturer, Pascal Van Hentenryck, in the initial video is stirring up interest imitating Indiana Jones - he's on a quest, he's passionate. So it's not the Hillier and Lieberman textbook approach to Operations Research of old. The whole point was to make the difficult problem of combinatorial problem solving fun and attractive to a wide audience. I agree with you that many managers haven't a clue what to do with an OR graduate. So it does depend on how you position yourself. One reason for taking the course is to be able to promote your skills passionately (try making a video of your skills in every day parlance like the introductory video to this lecture) using current terminology - which as Prof Van Hentenryck says are in demand at INFORMS conferences (go to the analytics conference - rather than the main conference which is more academic). I agree with you that many execs haven't a clue what optimization can do - or care - in fact most managers satisfice. That's why it's important to find the right boss who does value your accomplishments. It's also important to update how you state your value to others - which is one reason I'm doing the course. I hope you stick with it - and I'd be interested to know what you think at the end of it. Is the point of your argument that the leaderboard ranking forces people to try for an optimal solution, when in a business situation a solution at 99% of the value might be good enough?
  • graycat 13y ago
    The Indiana Jones take off is fine. Mentioning the knapsack problem is less good because it's not so important in practice. Saying that the knapsack problem is difficult to solve, e.g., encounters exponential algorithms because technically it's in NP-complete, is next to irrelevant for practice, misleading, and hype and not fine. > it's also important to update how you state your value to others On this, I outlined my suggestion: Own a little company and sell results based on how much money they save the customer. Make the sale about saving the customers money in ways that even an auditor can confirm are correct. INFORMS is clearly an echo chamber, people in optimization looking for work and talking to themselves. Broadly for optimization in business, there is a very serious problem: Optimization is not a 'profession' like law, medicine, or major parts of engineering. So, there is no licensing, certification such as the CPA, peer-review of practice, legal liability, etc. So, as I said, the field "don't get no respect". Also missing is a point the legal profession has: Any working lawyer must report only to a lawyer; the interface between the optimization guy and the business guy is nearly impossible. > Is the point of your argument ... I tried to make several points. One of the points was about 'optimal'. The mathematical definition is fine, but long that definition was taken as suggesting that what we should do in practice is look for such solutions, then strain to find them, etc. That turned out to be a grand mistake. Why? Because maybe there is, compared with what the customers is doing now, $10 million to be saved with an optimal solution. But too commonly saving all $10 million is too difficult for the algorithms and computing. So, straining to save all the $10 million converts an important business problem into a much more difficult mathematical problem. It also turns out that commonly it's fairly easy to save, say, $9 million. The difficulty is saving the last of the money, and the most difficult money to save is the last, say, the last 10 cents. 'Optimal' was taken as a moral objective, as I said, as if saving the last 10 cents was worth much more than 10 cents. Struggling over 'optimal' taken literally and, thus, making real problems much more difficult than necessary, was several torpedoes below the waterline of the ship of optimization. Part of this mistake was the simplistic and excessive emphasis on NP-completeness -- for real problems the whole P versus NP question is next to irrelevant. One way to see this is the simplex algorithm -- it's the core of optimization and astoundingly fast in practice but worst case exponential. There is a polynomial algorithm for linear programming, but it's way too slow in practice. In practice, that an algorithm is worst case exponential is commonly just irrelevant. I had to conclude that for business, optimization is a dead field. It got started due to WWII and US DoD funding, and maybe in places there is still some interest for US DoD problems. Here is a little: A post above, in response to a post of mine, claimed that IBM had a good optimization group. If so, then good for IBM. But I was at IBM's Watson lab, published a paper on optimization, and off and on considered joining the optimization group there. Phil Wolfe, William Pulleyblank, Ellis Johnson. and others were in that group. At one point, Roger Wets was visiting. The group did the IBM Optimization Subroutine Library (OSL). Then in 3 years near 1994, IBM lost $16 billion. Johnson joined George Nemhauser at Georgia Tech. Pulleyblank became a professor at West Point. Basically the optimization group fell apart. Maybe they put a group back together, but losing Johnson and Pulleyblank were big mistakes. E.g., again, with Pulleyblank at West Point, the US DoD remains interested in optimization. Heck, I supported myself and my wife through our Ph.D. degrees by working in optimization for the US DoD. In academics, the professors were to do research to get the field going, e.g., research in 'systems analysis', 'mathematical sciences', 'civil engineering', 'production', etc. Yes, if optimization problems were easy to solve, then optimization would have central roles in those fields. Alas, mostly important practical optimization problems are not so easy to solve, even approximately. So, the professors are still doing research -- maybe in some decades or centuries they will have something of serious importance for those fields. I doubt that the research is very well supported. I tried to give a summary of essentially a 'cultural contradiction' expecting optimization to be a popular field in business: By the time computing is ready to make optimization easy enough, there are other things to do with the computing making much more money than with optimization. It's not that optimization can't save money in business; there is money to be saved; in a lot of stable businesses, optimization can provide some of the highest ROI available to the business. So, there is some ground available there, what is in principle some fertile ground. So, there can be some optimization groups here and there. If the course prof has such a group in Australia, good for him. With some really impressive 'cases' published in, say, INFORMS, maybe mainline business will try optimization again. I doubt it, but maybe. Don't hold your breath waiting; there are lots of impressive cases long since published in INFORMS, and ORSA, Mangement Science, etc. The optimization literature is huge going back to the late 1940s, e.g., for Dantzig at Rand and Berkeley. Here's a little on the difficulty: In the US there are college accrediting groups, and for some years they said that an undergraduate degree in business should have courses in optimization and statistics. So, for years each business school student, undergraduate or MBA, got a course in optimization. For some years, I taught such courses. Still the field didn't take off. I can't recommend that anyone try to have a career in optimization in business. You stand to have an easier time supporting a family with a career as a plumber, literally. With software, do an information technology start up, sell out, and pocket, say, $10 million -- knocks the socks off optimization. With irony, if interested in 'optimization' of your career and financial security, then avoid optimization! Optimization is like some item at Dunkin Donuts that doesn't sell. Lots of other stuff at Dunkin Donuts sells really well, but that one item just doesn't. They can do a good job getting the item ready to eat, put it out in the display cases, and wait, and what happens is the item just sits there and goes stale. Then they throw away the stale, unsold items. It was a waste. Finally, Dunkin Donuts just quits offering the item. Dunkin Donuts doesn't go on and on about why the item really should sell. Instead, they just listen to the clear message they've gotten from the market and, thus, save having to figure out solid reasons it doesn't sell. Similarly all across business -- some stuff doesn't sell or doesn't sell very well or sells only a little and then only into a tiny market. Optimization in business is like that -- at best, it's a super tough sale; usually it just doesn't sell. Optimization, as a field, in business, is a dead duck. F'get about it and pursue something else.