The Traveling Salesdog Problem

Discussion (6 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jdw64•1 day ago

One thing I always feel while programming is that the important question is often not what to model, but what to exclude from the model.

In this case, he excluded the dog’s veto behavior. But if you tried to model that too, it would also be interesting.

It really is a difficult profession.

wespiser_2018•1 day ago

Practically speaking, Bebop is very excited to go out, and vetos are most common going home.

A plan with options might handle that, but that makes it trickier to satisfy the novelty constraint if each days plan needs to account for what was made on the previous day. Could be interesting to see what a plan with optionality looks like!

jdw64•1 day ago

Thanks, reply!That is a really difficult problem.

As you said, if Bebop refuses to go home, then the model has to remember the previous state, and the difficulty increases a lot. Usually, this kind of thing would be modeled with Markov rewards, using states and transition probabilities.

It is a fun problem. I really enjoy writing like this because it always gives me something worth thinking about.

wespiser_2018•3 days ago

Author Here: I wrote this about using numerical optimization to solve problems in my daily life. I'm interested if anyone else has done the same, and what worked for them!

randycupertino•about 22 hours ago

Interesting your dog loves novelty, ours loves routines.

My one criticism of your post is it needs more pics of the greyhound!

mvc•about 18 hours ago

Hello fellow sighthound owner. I have thought about it. But never done it.

Whenever I sit down with a few spare minutes to try it, my lurcher appears and wants a walk :-)

The Traveling Salesdog Problem

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (6 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews