📈 Raw enjoyments, State of Mathematical Optimization 2025, Scheduling the NFL
Local Optimum: short, imperfect-yet-useful ideas - Edition #10
Welcome to a new edition of Local Optimum: a short, imperfect-yet-useful collection of ideas related to optimization, decision-making, and applied Operations Research.
Let’s dive in! 🪂
1) 🍫 Raw enjoyments
An algorithm.
A mathematical model.
A forecast to feed your optimization problem.
Everything you create… If it doesn’t serve the business, it’s just entertainment.
And it’s good. I mean, if you want to have some joy with your code, experiment with algorithms, try new tools, do it! But don’t lie to yourself: a solution that is not in production might feel satisfying, but the business impact is still zero until it’s live.
Pick some orphan code living in your repo or hard drive, and ask yourself: what would have to be true for this to ship next quarter?
If nothing comes to mind, then throw it away, as if it never existed before.
That will give you clarity. Clarity will give you speed.
2) 🔢 State of Mathematical Optimization 2025
I just received an email from Gurobi and thought it’d be a great opportunity for our community to weigh in.
Everyone’s perspective matters. It took me 8 minutes to fill the survey.
3) 🏈 Scheduling the NFL
We tend to think that creating a schedule for a sport league like the NFL is an easy task.
It’s not.
You need to take into account flights, dates, international competitions, specific conditions…
Each new dimension adds complexity to an already complex problem.
It becomes so complex that they need 4000 machines and 3 months of time:
Are you addressing large-scale optimization problems?
Next Monday, I’ll share some ideas on how to reduce the complexity of optimization problems with different techniques.
I’ll cover:
🌪️ What large-scale problems are
💡 Ideas to help solving them
👣 First steps to take
If you tackle this kind of problems, this will be useful. See you Monday!
And that’s it for today!
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Have a nice day ahead ☀️
Borja.
