This is my life.

Two things, one morning:

1. I am work­ing on a 30-​​page report for an Oper­a­tions Research class, in which we are pick­ing apart a large-​​scale com­bi­na­to­r­ial opti­miza­tion prob­lem. We’ve spent (looks at cal­en­dar) seven weeks explor­ing in great detail why this one prob­lem is so very hard to solve with CPLEX. We mod­ify the con­straints, we fid­dle the objec­tive func­tion, we reframe and retrench. It’s actu­ally quite good, as a class, because it shows how very hard it is to solve large opti­miza­tion prob­lems with cur­rent stan­dard tools.

   We’re not using heuris­tics, of course. We don’t do that, much, where I work. And it’s not what the class is about.

   Because the class is, on the face of it, set up to train young prac­ti­tion­ers to think in the proper way about the Big Hard prob­lems they will have to solve in their future careers.

2. An old friend wrote. He works at a quan­tum com­put­ing com­pany. They solve dif­fi­cult com­bi­na­to­r­ial opti­miza­tion prob­lems. Fast. This is the future: hard things will become much easier.

Wait, was that a rain­drop? What the hell is this rain­drop on my homework?

Crap, now I’ll have to start over.