Ruben on Rails: How to Steal a World Record from Middle Schoolers

Abstract: The Guinness Book of World Records lists the record for fastest journey between every station on the London Underground as 17 hours, 46 minutes and 48 seconds. Gothenburg, being colloquially known as "Little London", of course deserves a little record of its own, substituting the underground for the tram network. This record is—to the speaker's knowledge—currently held by two boys in their younger teens, who claim a time of 5 hours and 19 minutes. In this talk, we use mathematical optimization techniques and a high-performance computing cluster to crush the dreams of these two boys and claim the record for ourselves.

Join me as I develop Ruben on Rails¹, an algorithm that finds the fastest journey passing all tram stops in a given day. During the talk, we will see advanced optimization techniques such as establishing dominance, solving the wrong problem, and ignoring nearly all of Hisingen—all employed in the endeavor to spend several consecutive hours on public transport "efficiently".

¹Since the topic (trams) is quintessentially Gothenburgian, it is only fitting that the algorithm has a name in the form of a Gothenburgian pun. Now, one shouldn't explain their jokes, but I am too proud of this one, and it is somewhat niche, so I'll break that rule: there is a web application framework called Ruby on Rails, and this work was done with—and initiated by—our very own Ruben Seyer, hence Ruben on Rails. Not that web application frameworks are at all relevant here. Anyway, I think this is hilarious, and will gladly accept compliments for my comedic genius in written or oral form.

Mathematics

Audience: general audience

Gothenburg PhD seminar

Series comments: Rooms and times may vary, please check the latest update. In-person only.