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.