4 ms·
> a mind blowingly dizzying number of permutations to get from A to B. Yes, but I don't think that's what most people desire to enumerate (or what the parent o
by deathanatos 12y ago
> a mind blowingly dizzying number of permutations to get from A to B.
Yes, but I don't think that's what most people desire to enumerate (or what the parent of your post had in mind). A simple enumeration of the flights available and their one-way prices would be a start. My understanding (from a link in another post) is that this would be ~(1 flight) * (average number of changes to a flight's data between birth and flight) updates per second, which I think is within reason.
My understanding is that airlines frustrate this by not pricing just individual flights, but giving odd discounts on round-trips and other odd combinations (such as A→B C→A) of flights, meaning you need more than just one-way prices. (There's also the fact that some airlines have like 5 or 6 different prices for a seat all on the same flight, depending on where in the plane the seat is.)
- Marazan 12y agoThere's all kinds of reasons that this isn't sufficient, return based pricing, multiple seat pricing bands for a single flight (for some airlines this is dynamically calculated on a moment-by-moment basis), airline and airports rules covering transfers for whether a given pair of flights connect or not, etc... the list is basically unlimited.