Mobile phones, ATMs, modern cars, televisions, e-readers: none of them would work without software. The heart of software is formed by algorithms: step-by-step procedures to perform given tasks.
If I give you a set of nodes, plus a way to find the distance between two nodes, how can you find all connections between these nodes as efficiently as possible?
Getting to class on time isn't hard, if you leave on time and know the fastest route. But what’s the fastest route when the hallways are crowded? For their final high school project, Dylan and Tobias worked on finding the most efficient ways to navigate school during peak hours.
The allocation of livers from organ donors to patients puts females at a disadvantage. A remedy was put into use in 2023, based on a common statistical model. This is expected to reduce sex disparity, but is not expected to solve the problem fully. Why? And what else can we do?
Elisabeth already has an idea in mind: she would like to find the fastest possible route that goes to each address exactly once before finally returning to the station. This task is a well-known mathematical problem, namely the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP)! How can she solve it?
