

Behind the Fiendish Complexities of Airfare Pricing - mattculbreth
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2007/07/mileage_software

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kmt
Those guys have built a business around an NP-hard problem. Is anyone here
working on solving hard computational problems and thinking of building a
business around it?

~~~
aston
I think the bigger story is less about computationally hard problems, but
about

1) finding a problem being solved the wrong way by the world and setting out
to solve it the right way

2) the pains of dealing with all of the proprietary (and often annoying) deals
and details in a well-established industry.

PS: It's easy to miss, but the interesting link here is
[http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-
com...](http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-
complexity/img0.html)

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Tichy
Is there a way to access the airfares data as an individual?

~~~
neilc
According to [http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-
com...](http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-
complexity/img1.html) :

"The search engines run on databases of flights, prices, and seat
availability, provided electronically over private networks by the 800 or so
airlines of the world. The data is not directly available to the general
public and access often must be negotiated with individual airlines [...] A
large portion of the flight, price and seat availability data, called
published data, is used by all the major search engines, but a significant
amount of private data is restricted."

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Jd
Anyone else see the toilet advert? Very disturbing...

