Forget the Travelling Salesperson Problem, this is the Travelling Influencer Problem
There is a concept called the “Travelling Salesperson Problem” (or TSP), where given a list of locations and distances, is possible to compute the shortest distance to visit every location once. The problem was first put forward in to 1930 to answer as a combinatorial optimisation problem.
Its use is widespread, especially in logistics planning, electronic circuit board soldering points and within biosciences. Anything with a point and a distance can pretty much be calculated as a TSP problem.
In its most basic form the TSP calculation is straightforward: (n-1)!/2 with n being the number of locations to visit, the factorial (7! Is equal to 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x1) is calculated and then divided by two as I’m only travelling in one direction.
For example where I live, in Northern Ireland, there are twenty-one National Trust locations, giving 1,216,451,004,088,320,000 possible route combinations (21–1)!/2, the shortest route is 417.5 miles (671.9km). It will take eleven hours to drive to every location but you won’t have any time to see anything when you get there.
If you were to calculate all the combinations for all 1,500 properties in the UK, the number of combinations is too big for this article, it spans 4,112 digits, even the mathematics engine Wolfram Alpha gave up on me and gave a long list of zeroes.
The Travelling Salesperson Problem is a fun problem to investigate if you are interested in such things. It is a beautiful knowledge graph problem to study. With the Travelling Salesperson Problem in mind, I may have stumbled on a subsection of the theory.
Let me introduce to you the Travelling Influencer Problem.
The aviation industry has been plunged into a crisis during the Covid pandemic, worse than the decline in air travel from the awful events of 9/11. The knock-on effect in the tourism and hospitality industry from the pandemic has been severe. Countries were slowly trying to encourage people to travel, fly and attempt to go on as “normal” though doing such a thing was near impossible. Rules change, variants are found, the whole thing as you would expect,is difficult to predict and work with.
Lockdown rules vary from country to country, the interpretation of those rules can sometimes be accepted or stretched as required. What counts as “essential travel” or “travel for work” purposes is now a hot topic in the media. Trial by social media is rife as those staying at home see others travelling without any real need to do so. Recently the aim has been straight on to Social Media Influencers.
In the UK, popular morning television show “This Morning” had an interview with Sheridan Mordew, an influencer from the UK who flew to the United Arab Emirates to take her motivational and daily workouts to her 12,500 Instagram followers. While the interview ran it showed video posts of Ms. Mordew riding a camel across the desert. For presenter Holly Willoughby, well it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. As the interview progressed the tone started to change on both sides, it wasn’t a full-blown argument, but I think two more minutes and it would have cut to a cookery segment. The story ran wild on social media and dragged the reputation of influencers who escaped the lockdown, with it. As far as the British public were concerned, it just was not playing the game fairly when most of them were stuck at home, furloughed, worried and being constantly told that they were in it all together.
In part, I believe, the interview forced governments to change their views on people travelling into certain countries. While there were no rules at the time from flying from the U.A.E. in the UK, that changed very quickly. On the 18th January the UK Government placed restrictions all countries on the travel corridor list, this is due to be lifted on February 15th but, as this pandemic has taught us, could be extended at any time. There is a list of countries that are exempt though and those can obviously be exploited if you wish to risk it, when there is something you can exploit then there may be something you can gain.
The Travelling Influencer Problem I believe is this. “Given a list of countries, government restrictions and distances, what is the shortest path to getting home without restrictions being placed on me?”. When you take time to think about it, it is an interesting problem. Maybe I am the only one?
Influencers potentially fleeing the sunny warm weather of Dubai (IATA airport code DXB) could easily travel to Dublin (DUB) and then transfer to any UK airport including those of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. As the Republic of Ireland is on the exempt UK travel corridor list there is little to stop travellers doing the hop as flights are still arriving from Dubai.
According to worldometers.info there are 195 countries in the world, converting this to a travel matrix you would have 37,830 elements (I am discounting internal flights and only using the international ones).
The fun only starts from there. If I was travelling from Fiji (NAN) to Manchester (MAN) what is the cheapest and most direct legal route? Is it west to east, Fiji (NAN) — Los Angeles (LAX) — Dublin (DUB) — Manchester (MAN) or is there a better west to east route? Here is a hint, buy separate tickets, but please don’t do as I say, do as I do.
Now, flight search engines have been doing the route/price calculations for a long time. Covid restrictions bring new complexity into these calculations. I wager that on the whole most travellers will abide by the rules, though if you see thousands of posts on Instagram mid-flight then you know what’s going on.
Please excuse me while I look at the patent application process for the Travelling Influencer Problem, I just might be on to something.
