Knight’s Tour
If you are interested in Chess, you may have come across Knight’s Tour problem before. Your task is to take a knight and place it anywhere on the chess board. Then, by performing legal Knight’s moves. can you visit each square on the chess board? Moreoever, you are only allowed to visit each square once […]
Vehicle Routing: VeRoLog Solver Challenge 2014
If you are interested in the Vehicle Routing Problem (although the actual problem being considered is called Swap-Body Vehicle Routing Problem (SB-VRP)), you might be interested in this competition. The deadline, to register, is the 31st Dec 2013 although the actual submission deadline is not until April, so you can register and still have plently […]
3D Bin Packing, help Santa and share $10,000
3D bin packing can help Santa It’s a little late to help Santa this year, but as this Kaggle competition (essentially a 3D bin packing problem) does not close until the 26th January 2014, you can contribute towards the planning that will no doubt start as soon as he touches down at the North Pole after […]
Can the Traveling Salesman Problem help Santa deliver presents?
In a few hours Santa will begin his annual tour of the world, dropping down chimney’s and delivering presents to all the children who have behaved themselves this year. He may not realise it, but he is solving a Traveling Salesman Problem as he plans which route to take. What is more amazing that he […]
What is Operations Research?
This post was originally posted on a University of Nottingham blog. What is Operations Research (OR)? The terms Operations Research (American term) and Operational Research (European term) are used interchangeably. The discipline is also referred to as: Management Science (most often used in a Business Management sense) Decision Science (less frequently used, but is used […]
Football fixture forecasting. Are you any good?
Football fixture forecasting is something I have expressed an interest in recently. Actually, this blog contains a forecasting category, that you might be interested in. In my last post, I mentioned a crowdfunding project that I am trying to get off the ground. This prroject aims to investigate football fixture forecasting, utilising methodologies such as Artificial […]
Crowdfunding: A new model to fund research?
A few weeks ago I came across something called crowdfunding. I have known about crowdsourcing for a while, but crowdfunding had escapsed me. I am not sure it is a good idea but I thought I would try it out (see my project here, it develops my project for football prediction or, for more general […]
Bibtax parser: Mashup no more
In some (many!) posts I have talked about parsing bibtex files. Till now, I have been using PHP, Excel – in fact anything I could find that meant that I did not have to write my own software. I suppose I was producing a form of mashup. All this seems to work but the problem […]
Is typesetting this difficult?
I am not going to name the journal, or the publisher, but I have just had a very frustrating experience. I was fortunate enough to have a paper accepted recently and we got to the point where the journal asked me to submit the final set of files so that they could typeset the article. […]
Latex Editors: WinEdt versus TeXstudio
For more years than I care to remember I have been using WinEdt as my latex editor and, to be honest, I quite like it. It does what it says on the tin. Sometimes, it required 2-3 compiles, along with 2-3 bibliography compiles. Actually, that may not be true but I got into the habit […]