Operations Research Tools developed at Google Open Sourced | Hacker News Reader

Operations Research Tools developed at Google Open Sourced

code.google.com

A little more information on it would be helpful. Like, a description. Or anything except acknowledgement of its existence, for which merely noting that https://code.google.com/p/or-tools/ does not return a 404 is wholly sufficient.

There seems to be an epidemic on most code hosting sites that prevents people from fleshing out information on their project. Is it just less fun than coding? Do they really not know what a good description / use case would be? Or is it just that most things are one-off attempts which will never be visited again, adding to the pollution of non-maintained code projects out there?

Here you go:

https://sites.google.com/site/ortoolssite/home/getting-start...

I went through the sources and found them to be fairly standard. Only thing that caught my eye was the heavy emphasis on bit-packing for the sake of performance.

Anyone trying to understand the algorithms is better off with an algorithmic OR text, as the C++ metaprogramming is a little dense on this one.

You can't build it quite yet since some dependencies (like the "gflags" directory) are entirely missing. Follow the project, they promised to release more later. It's only been out for a few days.

Gflags probably refers to this: http://code.google.com/p/google-gflags/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research

aka the best funded mathematical discipline. It can be used for good, or utter bureaucratic evil.

Have you found it to be well funded? I loved my college OR classes, but when I recruited for jobs I found that mathematical finance and mathematical CS were significantly more marketable (they have overlaps with OR but are not the same). http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos044.htm

Those two have better job markets, but OR has better funding possibilities. For OR, you can send your grant application to any mid-large corporation, promising to optimize one of their many messed up business processes and you get yourself a $50k on the spot.

Go to any decent campus and look around. OR people are usually older, with MBAs, and better healed financially. I worked for a few as a software developer (yeah, grad students who can afford to hire a software developer at market rates!)

Maybe I'm missing something, but does anyone see what the tool actually does. I saw the constraint solver, but there are already many existing packages that do the same (Octave is open-source, I believe). What is all the excitement about?

I don't know anything about OR but I see constraint solving on there. Has anyone looked at Alice ML or Oz for solving these kinds of problems? Do they apply? Am I confused?

Indeed Operations Research is a bit more than just Constraint Programming, but this is interesting (I'm an OR guy). A much larger framework with open-source software for OR is Coin-OR:

http://www.coin-or.org/

Shoot me an email please, I wanna bounce some ideas off of you if possible :-)

Operations Research was one of my favorite classes in college. Only after modeling the world, can you conquer it.

Interesting, thanks for the link. I wonder if this means ILOG is in trouble...

I doubt it considering that it is now owned by IBM and that it is still ridiculously faster than the competition.

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