Computing the optimal road trip across the U. S. Last week, Tracy Staedter from Discovery News proposed an interesting idea to me: Why not use the same algorithm from my Where’s Waldo article to compute the optimal road trip across every state in the U. S.? Visiting every U. S. state has long been on my bucket list, so I jumped on the opportunity and opened up my machine learning tool box for another quick weekend project. Note: If you’re not interested in the technical details of the project, skip down to the Road trip stopping at major U. S. landmarks section. Even more » Account Options. Sign in; Search settings. You have not yet voted on this site! If you have already visited the site, please help us classify the good from the bad by voting on this site. And don’t get clever with thematic or personally meaningful passwords. Sometimes humans do try to crack passwords, so don’t help them out by using your son’s. ![]() Planning the road trip. One of the hardest parts of planning a road trip is deciding where to stop along the way. Given how large and diverse the U. S. is, it’s especially difficult to make a road trip that will appeal to everyone. To stand a chance at making an interesting road trip, Tracy and I laid out a few rules from the beginning: The trip must make at least one stop in all 4. U. S. The trip would only make stops at National Natural Landmarks, National Historic Sites, National Parks, or National Monuments. The trip must be taken by car and never leave the U. ![]() MaineDOT Contractor Information. Current Construction Projects for Bid. S. With those objectives in mind, Tracy compiled a list of 5. U. S. landmarks — one in each state excluding Alaska/Hawaii and including D. C., and two in California. Tracy wrote about that process on Discovery News here. The result was an epic itinerary with a mix of inner city exploration, must- see historical sites, and beautiful natural landscapes. All that was left was to figure out the path that would minimize our time spent driving and maximize our time spent enjoying the landmarks. Image credit: Dean Franklin. Computing the optimal road trip across the U.S. With the list of landmarks in hand, the next step was to find the “true” distance between all of the landmarks by car. . Since we can’t just drive a straight line between every landmark — driving by car has this pesky limitation of having to stay on roads — we needed to find the shortest route by road between every landmark. If you’ve ever used Google Maps to get the directions between two addresses, that’s basically what we had to do here. Except this time, we needed to look up 2,4. Thankfully, the Google Maps API makes this information freely available, so all it took was a short Python script to calculate the distance and time driven for all 2,4. Now with the 2,4. We needed to order the list of landmarks such that the total distance traveled between them is as small as possible if we visited them in order. This means finding the route that backtracks as little as possible, which is especially difficult when visiting Florida and the Northeast. If you read my Where’s Waldo article, you’re already aware of how difficult it can be to solve route optimization problems like this one. With 5. 0 landmarks to put in order, we would have to exhaustively evaluate 3 x 1. To provide some context: If you started computing this problem on your home computer right now, you’d find the optimal route in about 9. Sun has entered its red giant phase and devoured the Earth. This complication is why Google Map’s route optimization service only optimizes routes of up 1. The traveling salesman problem is so notoriously difficult to solve that even xkcd poked fun at it: Clearly, we need a smarter solution if we want to take this epic road trip in our lifetime. Windows 7 Activation Toolkit Advance Tool Updated Version Of Flash . Thankfully, the traveling salesman problem has been well- studied over the years and there are many ways for us to solve it in a reasonable amount of time.If we’re willing to accept that we don’t need the absolute best route between all of the landmarks, then we can turn to smarter techniques such as genetic algorithms to find a solution that’s good enough for our purposes.Instead of exhaustively looking at every possible solution, genetic algorithms start with a handful of random solutions and continually tinkers with these solutions — always trying something slightly different from the current solutions and keeping the best ones — until they can’t find a better solution any more. I’ve included a visualization of a genetic algorithm solving a similar routing problem below. Road trip stopping at major U. S. landmarks. After less than a minute, the genetic algorithm reached a near- perfect solution that makes a complete trip around the U. S. in only 1. 3,6. I’ve mapped that route below. Note: There’s an extra stop in Cleveland to force the route between Vermont and Michigan to stay in the U. S. rather than go through Canada. If you’re able to drive through Canada without issue, then take the direct route through Canada instead. Click here for the interactive version. Assuming no traffic, this road trip will take about 2. The best part is that this road trip is designed so that you can start anywhere on the route as long as you follow it from then on. You’ll hit every major area in the U. S. on this trip, and as an added bonus, you won’t spend too long driving through the endless corn fields of Nebraska. Here’s the Google Maps of the route: [1][2][3][4][5][6](Note that Google maps itself only allows 1. Maps links.)Here’s the full list of landmarks in order: Grand Canyon, AZBryce Canyon National Park, UTCraters of the Moon National Monument, IDYellowstone National Park, WYPikes Peak, COCarlsbad Caverns National Park, NMThe Alamo, TXThe Platt Historic District, OKToltec Mounds, ARElvis Presley’s Graceland, TNVicksburg National Military Park, MSFrench Quarter, New Orleans, LAUSS Alabama, ALCape Canaveral Air Force Station, FLOkefenokee Swamp Park, GAFort Sumter National Monument, SCLost World Caverns, WVWright Brothers National Memorial Visitor Center, NCMount Vernon, VAWhite House, Washington, DCColonial Annapolis Historic District, MDNew Castle Historic District, Delaware. Cape May Historic District, NJLiberty Bell, PAStatue of Liberty, NYThe Mark Twain House & Museum, CTThe Breakers, RIUSS Constitution, MAAcadia National Park, MEMount Washington Hotel, NHShelburne Farms, VTFox Theater, Detroit, MISpring Grove Cemetery, OHMammoth Cave National Park, KYWest Baden Springs Hotel, INAbraham Lincoln’s Home, ILGateway Arch, MOC. W. Parker Carousel Museum, KSTerrace Hill Governor’s Mansion, IATaliesin, WIFort Snelling, MNAshfall Fossil Bed, NEMount Rushmore, SDFort Union Trading Post, NDGlacier National Park, MTHanford Site, WAColumbia River Highway, ORSan Francisco Cable Cars, CASan Andreas Fault, CAHoover Dam, NVBonus: Road trip stopping at popular U. S. cities. If you’re more of a city slicker, the road trip above may not look very appealing to you because it involves spending a lot of time outdoors. But worry not, for I created a second road trip just for you! The road trip below stops at the Trip. Advisor- rated Best City to Visit in every contiguous U. S. state. Note: Again, there’s an extra stop in Cleveland to force the route between New Hampshire and Michigan to stay in the U. S. rather than go through Canada. If you’re able to drive through Canada without issue, then take the direct route through Canada instead. But really, Cleveland is a nice city to stop in (ranked #5. Trip. Advisor). Click here for the interactive version. This road trip will more- or- less follow the same path as the major U. S. landmarks trip, covering a slightly shorter 1. U. S. Some larger states — like California and Texas — may have multiple cities you’d like to visit, so it’s probably worthwhile to stop at other larger cities along the route. You may note that cities from North Dakota, Vermont, and West Virginia are missing. Out of the top 4. Trip. Advisor, none were from North Dakota, Vermont, nor West Virginia. This is especially interesting because Trip. Advisor reviewers recommend cities like Flint, MI — the 7th most crime- ridden city in the U. S. — over any city in North Dakota, Vermont, and West Virginia. I’ll leave the interpretation of that fact to the reader. Here’s the Google Maps of the route: [1][2][3][4][5][6]Here’s the full list of cities in order: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Wichita, Kansas. Denver, Colorado. Albuquerque, New Mexico. Phoenix, Arizona. Las Vegas, Nevada. San Francisco, California. Portland, Oregon. Seattle, Washington. Boise, Idaho. Park City, Utah. Jackson, Wyoming. Billings, Montana. Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Omaha, Nebraska. Des Moines, Iowa. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Chicago, Illinois. Indianapolis, Indiana. Louisville, Kentucky. Columbus, Ohio. Detroit, Michigan. Cleveland, Ohio. Manchester, New Hampshire. Portland, Maine. Boston, Massachusetts. Providence, Rhode Island. Instagram Done Got Hacked.Instagram, Facebook’s hotter, snootier subsidiary, may have a massive data breach on its hands.This week, a security flaw within Instagram allowed hackers to assemble a database of what appeared to be verified users’ contact information—some of those affected purportedly being celebrities and politicians.According to the Verge, Instagram now says the known scope of the breach has expanded to include at least some unverified Instagrammers.“..We recently discovered a bug on Instagram that could be used to access some people’s email address and phone number even if they were not public,” Instagram CTO Mike Krieger wrote in a blog post.No passwords or other Instagram activity was revealed. there. We quickly fixed the bug, and have been working with law enforcement on the matter. Although we cannot determine which specific accounts may have been impacted, we believe it was a low percentage of Instagram accounts.”“We are very sorry this happened,” Krieger added. As the Daily Beast reported last week, the unknown hackers behind the breach claim to have compromised six million accounts and set up a website called “Doxagram,” which allegedly offered access to phone numbers, email addresses or both for 1,0. Instagram accounts at $1. While a few of the addresses were public information, “many did not return any relevant Google results, implying they were obtained from some private source.” The Beast was able to confirm some of the leaked accounts had valid contact information; the site was later taken offline. Per the Verge, cybersecurity firm Rep. Knight said supposed contact information for a number of celebrities featured on Doxagram was circulating on the dark web, ranging from Hollywood celebs like Emma Watson and Leonardo Di. Caprio to musician Harry Styles and boxer Floyd Mayweather. The Beast claimed the site even purported to have contact info behind President Donald Trump’s official Instagram profile, which was managed by White House social media director Dan Scavino. In addition to potentially exposing users to harassment, the breach could allow hackers to target them for social engineering attacks which could compromise their accounts. Instagram’s security hole may be linked to an incident on August 2. Selena Gomez—the most- followed user on the site—and posted nude photographs of Justin Bieber. Data breaches are not the only major problem reported at the social- media giant in recent days. On Friday, Mashable reported the site’s staff is rife with individuals willing to verify Instagram accounts for prices “anywhere from a bottle of wine to $1.
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