Writing about writing
Aviatrix explains the mystery of airline fares. Here’s the kicker:
According to a paper from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, “the problem of finding the cheapest airfare from point A to point B is unsolvable.”
Now will someone explain why burgers come in packs of four and buns come in packs of six? Why is there only one Monopolies Commission? Where are Saddam’s WMDs?
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Matthew Stibbe is Writer in chief at Articulate Marketing and editor of Golf Hotel Whiskey, the free online magazine for pilots.
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I think the burgers and buns inequality is there to bring you back to the store when you run out of one but not the other
The rest are mysteries to me…thanks for the links, the Aviatrix article and comments were interesting, and the conclusion of the paper was interesting, but I don’t have the time nor the desire to read it myself!
The paper is correct, but I think you have misunderstood their use of the word “unsolvable.” It is eminently solvable: calculate the price of every possible way to make this journey, including all the airplanes, routes, possible layovers, etc, and then search through that for the lowest price.
What unsolvable means from a computer science context, I think, is that there exists no solution that scales well. Keep in mind that when you dial your travel agent, you expect to hear some keys clicking and then an answer, in fairly rapid succession. So the computer has to run very quickly, search across at least dozens if not hundreds of airlines, and—do it again for each of the thousands if not millions of such queries it receives each minute.
In fact, it’s a minor miracle we can do this at all. It has been described to me as involving clusters of mainframe-scale computers and the kind of network throughput that would make a warez distributor want his mommy.
I guess that’s the best reason to use a travel agent over a website. They’re able to consider the past, what has been cheaper, and what’s likely to best meet the customers needs, thus avoiding the need to search every possible fare on every possible airline.
Daniel Rose´s last blog ..What’s your “orbital velocity”
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