You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Thomas comments on Open thread, Jul. 11 - Jul. 17, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: MrMind 11 July 2016 07:09AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (131)

Comments (131)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Thomas 13 July 2016 05:25:32AM *  0 points [-]

We did some benchmarks. Sometimes we did it well, sometimes not that well.

For example in the case of Job Shop Scheduling benchmark we were unable to break a single record. There are records waiting to be break in JSS area, but we haven't broken a single one.

But we are still holding some (years old) packing records right now.

One may say, that JSS is the base of every scheduling and that packing is not. In fact, the real life scheduling is more complicated than either one of those benchmarks. We have many more constrains in real life. And it turns out, that many constrains somehow help the evolution to find trade-offs.

Comment author: HungryHobo 13 July 2016 10:24:37AM 1 point [-]

if you're the holders of some records for certain problem types then that grabs my interest.

I'd suggest leading with that since it's a strong one.

Comment author: gjm 13 July 2016 03:49:04PM -2 points [-]

Not necessarily for their target market.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 14 July 2016 01:04:13PM 0 points [-]

I belief that being flexible about target markets is one of the major ways businesses grow.

Comment author: Thomas 14 July 2016 04:15:03PM *  0 points [-]

The best way to win principals is to show them that a ridiculously complex constrain may be applied and calculated automatically.

  • 4.5 school hours of S per week (4 hours on odd weeks and 5 hours on even weeks)
  • when there is the fifth hour in the week, then this hour may be the second hour of the subject S on that day
  • if it is on the same day, it should be immediately after the previous hour of the subject S
  • in the above case, it must be the last hour for the teacher
  • three classes of students are divided into 5 groups for the subject S
  • there are 4 teachers for those 5 groups, one teacher teaches groups number 2 and 4
  • there is a given list of students for groups 1, 3 and 5 and a combined list for students for groups 2 and 4
  • computer should divide the combined list into two separated lists (2 and 4) but they must not differ for more than 4 students in size
  • as one of those groups (2 or 4) are always idle, the subject M which is equally divided, must be taught then - or the S should be the first hour of the day
  • for there are only 4 hours of subject M per week
  • there are only 3 teachers of M
  • there are also 3 hours of subject A per week for those same students in 5 differently set groups
  • there are 5 teachers of A, but one of them also teaches the group number 1 of S
  • it would be nice but not mandatory if the number of waiting hours for students were 0

This is a real life example, I have discussed 1 hour ago with one of the teachers (math teacher) in one of our schools. It is not the most complex demand we had, by far.

S = Slovenian language M = Math A = Anglescina (guess what that is)

Comment author: HungryHobo 15 July 2016 09:22:21AM 1 point [-]

fair enough, I was underwhelmed by your initial post describing it but I agree that showing that your system can handle weird constraints in real examples is an excellent demonstration.

The record thing to me just happens to be a good demonstration that you're not just another little startup with some crappy schedualling software, you're actually at the top of the field in some areas.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit