An international team of mathematicians has worked out the world’s longest pub crawl, plotting thousands of pubs across the United Kingdom during a two-year project.
It may have taken two years to complete, but actually visiting each of the 24,727 pubs on the map may take a lifetime.
The team graphed the shortest possible routes between every pub listed on the very comprehensive Pubs Galore website.
Only the most hardcore pub-goers would ever conceive of tackling such a monumental map, considering that the total distance one would have to travel is around 45,495km – or twice the Earth’s circumference.
So, a little more than stumbling distance.
According to Professor William Cook from the University of Waterloo, Canada, the project was taken on as an example of one of the most intensively studied problems in computational mathematics called the ‘travelling salesman problem’. It aims to find the shortest route between a number of locations before returning to a starting point and is the largest ‘travelling salesman’ problem ever solved.
They’ve laid out the whole shebang on an interactive GoogleMap, just in case anyone is serious about taking on the task.
Professor Cook maintains that the map was not made “to improve the lot of a wandering pub aficionado,” but rather “as a means for developing and testing general-purpose optimisation methods, which have wide applications in science, industry and commerce”.
Likely story, we reckon …
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