Tag Archives: art

March 13, 2009

Mona Lisa TSP Challenge

I totally missed the announcement of the Mona Lisa TSP Challenge (100K cities) last month. My apologies.

An optimal solution to the 100,000-city Mona Lisa instance would set a new world record for the TSP. If you have ideas for producing good tours or for showing that a solution is optimal, this is a very nice challenge problem! I would be happy to report any computational results you obtain on this example.

Check out the neat TSP art and domino art by Bob Bosch, even if you don’t work on the challenge.

Opt art

Mona Lisa TSP Art by Bob Bosch

Leave a comment | tags: art | posted in Uncategorized

April 3, 2007

Last month, Robert Bosch gave a fascinating talk on operations research and art here at Virginia Commonwealth University. His talk focused on showcasing how optimization, in particular, using entire sets of dominos to reconstruct paintings and images, such as the Mona Lisa and Marilyn Monroe. You can see his masterpieces at DominoArtwork. It was fascinating to see an illustration of how art connects to optimization.

Some links:
DominoArtwork
Bob’s OR/MS Today article
Images using knots
Science for kids article featuring Bob’s art