

Travelling Salesman – Official Movie Site - neckbeard
http://www.travellingsalesmanmovie.com/

======
ntoshev
A "review" from Luis Guzman,
[https://plus.google.com/u/0/103069458643902853500/posts/Jg8R...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/103069458643902853500/posts/Jg8R1nazWJ7):

 _So what is the movie about?_

"Travelling Salesman is an intellectual thriller about four mathematicians
hired by the U.S. government to solve the most elusive problem in computer
science history -- P VS. NP. The four have jointly created a "system" which
could be the next major advancement for our civilization or destroy the fabric
of humanity.

The solution's immediate use would exist within computer science. However,
it's application would soon extend to countless other disciplines. For
example, by utilizing the solution to P vs. NP, a hacker can crack advanced
encryption codes within seconds--a task that now takes weeks, months, or even
years. He could break into La Guardia's air traffic control or China's
communication grid. But the mathematical algorithm would also serve as the
basis for accelerated biological research, curing diseases such as AIDS and
cancer."

 _So what is the P vs. NP problem?_

Well, the P vs. NP problem is a real mathematics problem and is one of the
seven Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Problems. A correct solution to
any of the problems results in a $1,000,000 prize.

The Clay Institute states: "Suppose that you are organizing housing
accommodations for a group of four hundred university students. Space is
limited and only one hundred of the students will receive places in the
dormitory. To complicate matters, the Dean has provided you with a list of
pairs of incompatible students, and requested that no pair from this list
appear in your final choice. This is an example of what computer scientists
call an NP-problem, since it is easy to check if a given choice of one hundred
students proposed by a coworker is satisfactory (i.e., no pair taken from your
coworker's list also appears on the list from the Dean's office), however the
task of generating such a list from scratch seems to be so hard as to be
completely impractical. Indeed, the total number of ways of choosing one
hundred students from the four hundred applicants is greater than the number
of atoms in the known universe! Thus no future civilization could ever hope to
build a supercomputer capable of solving the problem by brute force; that is,
by checking every possible combination of 100 students. However, this apparent
difficulty may only reflect the lack of ingenuity of your programmer. In fact,
one of the outstanding problems in computer science is determining whether
questions exist whose answer can be quickly checked, but which require an
impossibly long time to solve by any direct procedure. Problems like the one
listed above certainly seem to be of this kind, but so far no one has managed
to prove that any of them really are so hard as they appear, i.e., that there
really is no feasible way to generate an answer with the help of a computer. "

 _So what is the travelling salesman problem?_

Well, the travelling salesman problem (TSP) is also a real mathematics problem
and it asks the following question: Given a list of cities and the distances
between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits
each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? It is an NP-hard
problem in combinatorial optimization, important in operations research and
theoretical computer science. So you can see it is related the the P vs. NP
problem!

In the book, In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits
of Computation by William J. Cook, it states: "Selecting the best tour through
a set of points and knowing it is the best is the full challenge of the TSP.
Users of a brute-force algorithm that sorts through all permutations can be
certain they have met the challenge, but such an approach lacks both subtlety
and, as we know, practical efficiency. What is needed is a means to guarantee
the quality of a tour, short of inspecting each permutation individually. In
this context, the tool of choice is linear programming."

 _So what is linear programming?_

Well, linear programming (LP), or linear optimization, is not computer
programming! It is a mathematical method for determining a way to achieve the
best outcome (such as maximum profit or lowest cost) in a given mathematical
model for some list of requirements represented as linear relationships.
Linear programming is a specific case of mathematical programming
(mathematical optimization).

In the book, In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits
of Computation by William J. Cook, it states linear programming is: "an
amazingly effective method for combining a large number of simple rules,
satisfied by all tours, to obtain a single rule of the form 'no tour through
this point set can be shorter than X.' The number X gives an immediate quality
measure: if we can also produce a tour of length X then we can be sure that it
is optimal."

The founders of this subject are Leonid Kantorovich, a Russian mathematician
who developed linear programming problems in 1939, George Dantzig, who
published the simplex method in 1947, and John von Neumann, who developed the
theory of the duality in the same year.

 _So what is the simplex method?_

Well, the simplex method, or simplex algorithm, is just a popular algorithm
for linear programming! Dantzig provided an original example of this method by
finding the best assignment of 70 people to 70 jobs to exemplify the
usefulness of linear programming. The computing power required to test all the
permutations to select the best assignment is vast; the number of possible
configurations exceeds the number of particles in the universe. However, it
takes only a moment to find the optimum solution by posing the problem as a
linear program and applying the Simplex algorithm! In 2000, it was named one
of "The Top Ten Algorithms of the Century".

 _Who was George Dantzig?_

There's a well-known account of Dantzig, "the father of linear programming,"
during his time as a mathematics student at UC Berkeley. One day, Dantzig was
running late to a class taught by the famous Jerzy Neyman. When he arrived, he
saw two problems on the blackboard and scribbled them down as homework
problems. After class, Dantzig began working on them and turned in the
solutions several days later.

Six weeks later, on a Sunday morning, Dantzig was woken up by the noise of
someone banging on the door of his house. He opened the door and was surprised
to see his professor, Jerzy Neyman, at the door holding a handful of papers.
His excited professor said, "I've written an introduction to one of your
papers! Read it so I can send it out right away for publication!"

As it turns out, these two problems on the blackboard were not homework
problems, but famous unsolved problems in mathematical statistics. Without
knowing it, Dantzig solved two unsolved statistics problems for homework.

Later on, when Dantzig was having difficulty finding a topic for his thesis,
Neyman told him to just put his solutions to those two problems into a binder
and that Neyman would accept the solutions as Dantzig's thesis!

"Sounds like magic, but linear programming is indeed the method adopted in all
of the most successful exact TSP approaches proposed to date. Moreover, its
application to problems beyond the TSP has made it one of the great success
stories of modern mathematics."

References: <http://www.travellingsalesmanmovie.com/>
<http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/>
[http://books.google.com/books/about/In_Pursuit_of_the_Travel...](http://books.google.com/books/about/In_Pursuit_of_the_Traveling_Salesman.html?id=S3bxbr_-
qhYC) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_programming>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig>

------
Samuel_Michon
One of the clearest examples I’ve seen of HTML5 Animation maturing. I had to
right-click to check whether it was done in Flash. The site even comes with a
splash screen and a ‘Skip intro’ button. The horizontal scrollbars down the
middle of the page and the Mystery Meat navigation feel very authentic. I love
how the actual content is placed in lightboxes, making very little use of the
available space. The barely legible 90s techno fonts really finished the look.
Bravo!

------
runn1ng
Damn, and there I hoped it will be a trailer about a salesman in early 1900s
(when the problem was starting to be defined and studied), traveling across
Europe and trying to meet all the major European cities with the shortest
amount of time, with overtones of disappearing the Victorian era and entering
the new century with the ideals for new, more industrialized and exact world
of 20th century with some foreshadowing into the rampant nationalism and two
wars that followed. Was it the growing influence of math and algorithms (that
made concepts like "Traveling Salesman problem" even possible) that directly
or indirectly caused the genocides of the past century? All that could be
asked by the salesman, traveling from city to city in the shortest amount of
time, in the train, or maybe newly built Daimler-Mercedes car.

And instead I got guys sitting in a room. Damn.

------
jmduke
I'll be honest, this looks comically bad and has no merit besides the fact
that it has a geeky premise.

I'm sure the underlying discussion of "What if P=NP? is solved?" is incredibly
interesting but what I got from the trailer was that this was a movie with a
bad script, bad cinematography, bad acting, and bad editing.

~~~
pavedwalden
I'm hesitant to totally dismiss the movie, but the trailer definitely left me
cold. In addition to all the problems you mentioned, I feel like they blew the
"____ simplified" gimmick, which _almost_ worked to tie the trailer together.

In some ways the trailer reminded me of Primer but it didn't quite make the
low-budget vibe work in it's favor. Having made a few student films, but never
having made a _good_ short film, it's still hard for me to put my finger on
the little differences that make something like this work.

~~~
ctdonath
Delivery. The trailer lost me when the characters were just actors delivering
lines; characters in _Primer_ came across as speaking for real. Such a little
difference, but one that makes it work.

------
wronskian
I've seen the film already - there have been a few screenings of it here in
Cambridge, UK at the university maths department. (Indeed, I wasn't aware it
hadn't been generally released!) It's an interesting idea and quite reasonably
played out without too much cliche and, impressively, not too many blunders in
maths or tech. The way the premise has been turned into plot is not, however,
so sound. Still, I found it sufficiently engaging and I'd recommend a viewing
for anyone with an academic maths or science background.

------
Paul_S
The website didn't load initially, so I allowed it javascript and cookies,
fine. Then the hilarious "skip intro" button transported me back to the 90s.
Then the website finally loaded with style over substance and a hilariously
tiny window in which text appears. Thank god it loads up the whole website so
you can at least disable the retarded CSS and view the text of the site -
better than in most cases I guess.

I don't like where the web is going, it was on the right track with CSS but
it's getting ridiculous again. Now I need javascript to read text and view
pictures.

------
lt
The concept reminds me of Charles Stross "Antibodies", first story of the
Toast collection, available free here:

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/toast/to...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/toast/toast-intro.html)

Quick and worthy a read.

------
jere
Interesting concept. Probably worthwhile as a teaching tool, but don't get
your hopes up about it being good. The trailer doesn't impress, the 4.8 rating
on IMDB is nothing to ignore, and I think wikipedia is being dishonest when it
says "early reviews have been favorable" when in fact the two supporting
citations both link to the same article that actually says this:

>Unfortunately, this means that the majority of the film consists of five men
having a heated discussion in a stark, washed-out blue room in some anonymous
government building. Other than Horton, we never even learn the characters’
names. The low-budget aesthetic and grounding in hard science is reminiscent
of the excellent time-travel film Primer, but Travelling Salesman is far less
ambitious. A few flashbacks help break up the film, but you can’t help think
this particular story would be better served as an hour-long play.

And yea, it's clear that the film is at least partially inspired by Primer.
I'm not sure if this really bothers me, though _I_ once made a short film
vaguely inspired by Primer and was harshly called out for it. Compare the
trailers:

<http://youtu.be/4CC60HJvZRE>

<http://youtu.be/6ybd5rbQ5rU>

------
mtdewcmu
I know what I'd do if I alone knew the solution to the TSP: I'd become a
traveling salesman. Or, perhaps, I'd start a business that employs traveling
salesmen and use the efficiency gains to amass dazzling wealth and power.

~~~
zaptheimpaler
<http://xkcd.com/399/> ;)

~~~
nnnnni
xkcd: always relevant.

------
sgloutnikov
Could be good. I really enjoyed 'Deception Point' by Dan Brown and it seems
this could be something of the sort...

~~~
blowski
If it's anything like Deception Point, I'll be staying well clear of it.
Typically, stories in that genre use compsci-babble as smoke and mirrors to
cover up the lack of storyline.

~~~
dspeyer
This film at least seems to be well-researched, unlike Dan Brown.

------
bglusman
I saw this film at the premiere in Philadelphia about a year ago... I was
prepared for it to be awful, but I thought it was actually pretty good, albeit
a) a bit more like a filmed play in structure than a film (largely takes place
in one room with 4 or 5 actors), and b) comically low budget means you have to
excuse a few places it's... lacking production value. But I think if you
enjoyed, say, Primer and/or Twelve Angry Men, than you're likely to enjoy the
film overall, or at least not think it's nearly as bad as the trailer may have
made you fear!

------
aptwebapps
Is joke, right?

------
jpswade
Reminded me of The Matrix Office Space Mash Up...

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkDHDYy_9cE>

------
twic
Ken Regan, who is some kind of computerologist, has a really interesting post
pointing out that TSP is actually one of the easier NP-complete problems, and
even an O(n) solution only reduces the interesting NP-complete problems to
really hard polynomial-time problems.

[http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/the-travelling-
sale...](http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/the-travelling-salesmans-
power/)

------
ctdonath
Could be fun if "what if..?" movies like this were made with an accompanying
short (same actors, set, etc) following the alternate answer to the key
question. In this case, the dramatic gathering of the 4 smartest men by the
government to answer "P = NP?", and they proceed to answer the question:
"General, we have proof of the answer. P != NP. Some things really are really
hard. Good day."

------
rebhan
The problem is practically solved, use Genetic Algorithms and you's find a
solution which is sufficient for any practical uses.

~~~
tripzilch
The Concorde TSP Solver does not use GAs.

GAs are _not_ the best approach even for randomized heuristic approximations.
Mostly they are cute, biologically intriguing programming exercises for people
that don't care about sitting down and formally working out the specifications
of a serious optimization problem. Often they end up throwing many CPU-hours
at a relatively simple problem that they weren't even looking to solve, and
get a sub-optimal solution because they didn't even bother to optimize the
learning/mutation schedule, which would speed it up by an order of magnitude,
but that would require maths and thinking, instead of just throwing more
randomness against the wall because "it's evolution".

Genetic Algorithms aren't even easier to implement than other randomized
heuristic approximations. For instance, Simulated Annealing is basically (but
not quite) a GA with a population of one, so you don't need selection or
crossover (do you use tournament selection or roulette selection? does it
matter? will you try both? what will be your population size?). Simulated
Annealing is much easier to implement and has fewer variables to optimize
(such as the cooling/learning schedule). Of course it's not nearly as "sexy"
as the biologically inspired genetic algorithm.

Most importantly however, a GA does not solve P?=NP, so it is _not_ sufficient
for the premise to this movie, which is about the consequences of solving
P?=NP, not about arriving at suboptimal but perhaps sufficient solution in
almost reasonable time to a TSP problem that doesn't actually have a practical
use.

------
aet
Melting point of sand (silicon dioxide, or Quartz): 1723 C. So what material
is the coin in the example?

~~~
yeison
Don't you see? Finding the coin is easy. Changing the sand to glass and
finding the coin is trivial.

~~~
yeison
TECHNOLOGY. POLITICS. MONEY. ENERGY. SCIENCE. DATA.

------
nreece
The trailer is interesting but the IMDb rating (4.8) and the top comment on
YouTube make it look unimpressive.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybd5rbQ5rU>

~~~
bru
> the IMDb rating (4.8)

Well actually it reads

> Ratings: 4,8/10 from 53 users

so I do not think the population is big enough to be relevant.

~~~
nreece
Imo, considering the genre of the film and the limited audience of indie
films, the rating population is not that important in this case.

------
joshka
Rated NP

------
kaa2102
I studied Industrial Engineering & Operations Research (OR) in undergrad and
grad school. Traveling Salesman is one of the classic OR problems. It's fun to
see OR make it on the silver screen.

------
feniv
I love hypothetical science fiction movies like this, but they so often get
criticized for the improbability of their premise rather than admired for
their vision.

~~~
ctdonath
Many do manage to express their vision well enough to rise above their
improbability. Primer, Source Code, Cube, plenty of others are utterly
implausible yet garnered praise.

------
andyjsong
Watch it, then play it on: <https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/tbsp>

------
scscsc
The trailer is here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybd5rbQ5rU>

------
dlss
Put this on iTunes so I can buy it :)

------
kruhft
I've been waiting for this to come out. I'm sure it'll be entertaining in some
way :)

------
JohnLBevan
I can't wait for the sequel; The Chinese Postman.

~~~
doug1001
"Seven Bridges of Koningsberg" would nicely complete the trilogy.

------
lazugod
What a frustrating trailer. Show, don't tell.

------
aidenn0
Prediction: won't be as good as Sneakers.

------
goloxc
Anyone seen Pi?

~~~
ctdonath
Yup. There wasn't a second date.

The trailer was quite reminiscent of Pi, right down to the [near] monochrome
imagery and someone's head getting drilled.

------
nickporter
do not want

------
zerr
Now in the real world - those four would be Asians :)

