

Operations Research Tools developed at Google Open Sourced - nikosdimopoulos
https://code.google.com/p/or-tools/

======
Groxx
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?

~~~
mahmud
Here you go:

[https://sites.google.com/site/ortoolssite/home/getting-
start...](https://sites.google.com/site/ortoolssite/home/getting-started)

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.

~~~
oomkiller
Gflags probably refers to this: <http://code.google.com/p/google-gflags/>

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rfugger
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research>

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

~~~
lunchbox
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>

~~~
mahmud
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!)

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ora600
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?

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sausagefeet
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?

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merraksh
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/>

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

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

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

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

