Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering if a constraint solving library like optaplanner could help here - believe it uses simulated annealing.

Hey, maybe a use case for Dwave? j/k.

Trivia: The first major public demonstration of D-Wave used a modified version of our PerfectTablePlan table planner software to show how D-Wave could solve a real world optimization problem. https://www.perfecttableplan.com/newsletters/newsletter10_we...

Nice. I sat through a sales presentation/demo by D-Wave once. Very interesting, though limited to a particular class of problems.

Heck, the copy on their homepage is a big clue:

"Our customers are building quantum applications for problems as diverse as logistics, portfolio optimization, drug discovery, materials sciences, scheduling, fault detection, traffic congestion, and supply chain management. What problem can we help you solve?"

You have to REALLY need it to spend the money.

This is precisely what optaplanner was designed to do. Note the optaplanner has been forked by its original author and main contributor when they left RedHat/IBM. The fork is called "TimeFold", most development happens there now.

> The fork is called "TimeFold", most development happens there now.

Thanks. Last time I used optaplanner was several years ago on an aerospace project - if I need a constraint solver again I'll definitely look at TimeFold.

Yea Optaplanner is pretty good. It's definitely gotten better over the years in terms of usability, especially with Constraint Streams.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com