Win a trip around the world based on an algorithm you write!
Do you love a challenge? Good news, our Travelling Salesman Challenge is back! This time we’re asking teams of two or three to find the cheapest route between pre-defined areas. If your algorithm can do that, you’ll have the chance to travel around the world for free.
This year, once again, we’ll provide all contestants with real-time data and you’ll have the opportunity to get your hands on an NP-hard problem and have some fun with it.
What’s behind the challenge?
Kiwi.com already has a feature called NOMAD that can get you from a starting point and back to as many cities as you want, no matter the order. This way you can book amazing trips for very little money. But we want to take it further…
Imagine being an American college student who just wants to visit five amazing European countries on the cheap over her summer break. Finding the flight connections without caring about where exactly she’s going to and in what order would be cool, right?
The problem is, grouping the cities into areas and skipping the ordering requirement makes the search an NP-hard problem that’s been around, in essence, for over 80 years.
At Kiwi.com, we love challenges and we reckon you do too. We want to work on it with people from the wider tech and academic community who know the problem, enjoy working on it, and think they’ve got something to offer us in developing ways to solve it. However, we can guarantee that everything you create in the challenge will belong to you.
What will you get out of it? The winning team will actually get to go on their trip around the world based on the algorithm they code!
Are you in? Here’s the task
Your task is to determine the cheapest possible connection between specific areas, where an area is a set of cities. The solution must meet various criteria, for example, the trip should start from an area we give you; in each area, you must visit exactly one city (but you can choose which one); and you have to move between areas every day.
Sound appealing? Build your team and register today. The deadline for submitting your solution is 29 October.
