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A comment on NeurIPS 2020 Optimization Competition. Parent comment

Re:NeurIPS 2020 Optimization Competition by wenc on Thursday July 09, 2020 @05:27PM (#23785430)
Yes, when Bill Bixby (founder of CPLEX and Gurobi, companies that made and still make the fastest MIP solvers in the world) revealed similar numbers a few years ago, many of us practitioners were astounded too.

But those improvements were also a product of lots of smart people funded by cash-rich industries (i.e. oil & gas, airlines... MIPs are big bucks commercially. I recall at one point a commercial CPLEX license was $100k list) poking at the problem for over 30 years. Many Ph.D.s in operations research and mathematical optimization were generated on this topic alone.

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Re:NeurIPS 2020 Optimization Competition by cs702 on Thursday July 09, 2020 @05:42PM (#23785563)
Makes sense.

Note that now we have lots of smart people funded by new cash-rich industries (search, social networks, SaaS, etc.) poking at the problem with "black-box" approaches. I will be interesting to see what comes out of it.

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