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.
When you browse the internet a lot of websites show you banners with advertisements. And if you reload the page some new flashy advertisement pops up in the same place. Did you know that while your web page is loading an auction takes place?
Every January, the best chess players in the world compete in the TATA Steel Chess Championship, organized in Wijk aan Zee (The Netherlands). Among this year’s fourteen participants were Magnus Carlsen, world no. 1, coming into the tournament with an unbeaten streak of 104 matches, and Fabiano Caruana, the world no. 2.
. Suppose you are coming to the Netherlands for the first time, you want to enjoy your time in the country in the best possible way and probably visit and see as much as possible. So you rend a car and you decide to travel around. But now the challenge begins, planning such a trip!
A lot of services that we enjoy every day, for example commuting by train or ordering some product from a web-shop, give rise to very complex problems, like making the daily train schedule or deciding how all the products that have been ordered should be delivered. How can we efficiently solve such problems? In this article I will explain how a method called preprocessing works.
