
UK24727: a shortest-possible walking tour through the pubs of the United Kingdom - robinhouston
http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/pubs/
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Paul_S
Based on alcohol metabolism rate, how long would the pub crawl take (ignoring
liver failure)? What's the optimal rate of inebriaton - equal intervals or
concentrated intakes. We need an equally dedicated team of doctors to get on
this.

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sp332
As steady as possible. Your liver processes alcohol continuously, so you want
to hit your optimal BAC by drinking somewhat faster at first and then
maintaining it.

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sp332
Looks like the whole folder has been deleted. Does anyone have a copy?

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d33
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FNC1ma...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FNC1maHoZUEJ:www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/pubs/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

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hackcasual
This is something I've been meaning to put together a post on, where NP
problems are actually easy to solve. Take the subset sum search problem as an
example, there's 2 "regions" of the problem space where total solutions can be
done in P. If the values are either relatively small or relatively large,
solving it is quite easy:

Find 23 given [1, 2, 2, 3, 1...] Find 40 given [35, 15, 98, ...]

A lot of situations where you might give up on trying to compute an exact
solution can turn out to have underlying data that makes it possible.

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petercooper
This is very cool, though I was intrigued nowhere in the central Highlands is
covered (or the entire Isle of Skye, which is accessible by pedestrians from
the mainland) as there are many pubs there, including those listed on the Pubs
Galore site used as the dataset, such as
[http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/pubs/51660/](http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/pubs/51660/)
(or, say, the four listed in Mallaig, also not reached on the route at all).

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lrem
From the data description:

For our data set, we pruned the full list. First, based on names, we removed
establishments that seemed more like restaurants than public houses. So TGI
Friday's was out and the The Plough and Horses was in. Second, we took only
the first location of pubs that had a number of branches in the same town.
Third, we removed any pub that was marked as permanently closed by the members
of Pubs Galore. Finally, we removed several pubs that could not be reached by
foot, such as those located in airport terminals.

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trevyn
The little loop near Columbia Road in the very upper-right of this pic is a
bit odd:
[http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/pubs/img/london_zoom.jpg](http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/pubs/img/london_zoom.jpg)

It's taking two separate paths to get from the pub in the bottom-left of the
loop to the intersection that creates the loop. One of these paths must be
shorter, so why isn't that path taken both to and from that pub?

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ryanmonroe
They may be using a public transit route which goes in only one direction or
can only be boarded at the point on the other side of the loop.

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trevyn
"a shortest-possible walking tour"...

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ryanmonroe
"You see that we obviously cannot walk several of the indicated routes"

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zeveb
So it turns out that for all the pubs currently listed in the UK, the shortest
path is 28,269 miles. That's actually pretty doable: were one independently
wealthy and heavily beer-minded, one could do it in 10-15 years of hard (and
thirsty) work!

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highlander
Many pubs in Scotland are missing, not only on the islands but also on the
mainland. Nairn, Forres and Applecross all appear without pubs on the map, but
it is easy to check Google to see that all of these towns have pubs.

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drspacemonkey
Well, they did say that they restricted themselves to the 24k pubs in the Pubs
Galore guide.

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highlander
Pubs Galore shows pubs in Nairn, Forres and Applecross.

[http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/towns/nairn/highland/](http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/towns/nairn/highland/)
[http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/towns/forres/grampian/](http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/towns/forres/grampian/)
[http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/pubreviews/51349/](http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/pubreviews/51349/)

EDIT: maybe these were added after they snapshotted the data.

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jasmcole
As both a pub-loving UK citizen and someone who has just finished the
excellent book 'In Pursuit of the Travelling Salesman' (written I think by the
authors of this article), this is a highly timely submission!

