Yes, we are here! I have a shortest path between the 53 covered bridges in New Hampshire. (And if you’re just join now, yes, I know there are 54 bridges, it just that two of them share the same parking coordinates.) How did I find it? I reset to square one. I don’t have the computer science chops to understand why the pthon-mip solution wasn’t working for me, so I googled. And yes, I started off googling. But this time I hit something new. I don’t know if I missed it before or if it is new code, but I found a new open source package that would perfect for…

Wow, it’s been awhile since I posted, which was on January 26th. That’s because I don’t like failure and failure was where I wound up. But let’s back up a bit. I was referred to Developing Customized Branch-&-Cut algorithms on the python-mip site. So I went back there and grabbed their sample code showing a Branch and Cut solution. When reading over the program I noticed that it was not using a triangular matrix, but a rectangular one. This is because the distance from A to B might not be the same as the distance from B to A! You can have one way streets or bridges, or whatever. And…