canadiancow

I think that cap was added after v2 where there was a way to get AQM at a reasonable cost, and wings at an insanely low cost.

I don't think it would have been possible to hit 750k in v3, and I don't think it's possible in v4, unless you literally fly all day every day until the end of the contest.

But given that, who cares if it's in there? They're protecting themselves in case they've missed something obvious, and it doesn't negatively affect any of us.

Flyer4Ever

How long does the miles get credited to my Wings account? I'm an Altitude member but still stuck at 0 points...albeit, I just registered.

canadiancow

They do sweeps every so often. Maybe once a week or so?

YYT82

Just booked my first EYW4 itinerary. With careful planning, I should be able to finish in the top 20 and not take too many unnecessary trips (1 or 2 max).

philelite

Spent last night planning some routes and took some info from cows and others on here. I'm aiming for about 80,000-90,0000 Wings.

I work for IBM and might try write a simple program to find some optimal routes from YVR with Prairies and Scenic Drive badges. I mean I also have access to a Watson computer and CPLEX to run optimization models but I think that might be overkill!

c_9

"might"

HerpaYvr

No, I think you are OK.....it's about the win

I may not be as good looking or as smart as most of you, but I am trying to figure this out with my abacus, no fancy computers!

So for early May over a day and half, I got for $1,000 11 flights, for 3,200 wings & four badges plus the Prairie bage? All in Western Canada! I stretched a four flight trip into 11 flights!

okazon69

With cow's programming skills from the last rounds and now philelite stepping in, one interesting outcome from this could be a very nerdy get-together to compare algorithms and such. Perhaps even a research paper!

c_9

Sign me up! I can't afford to compete but am playing with ITA Matrix a lot daydreaming!

philelite

^

canadiancow

So right now, my code has two "problems":

1. It can't run through every possible itinerary because it simply takes too long. There are various optimizations that can be done here, and it can be parallelized, but:
-In v3, running it with parameters that made it take 5 minutes resulted in pretty much the same itinerary as 60 minutes, so I think the algorithm is pretty good at selecting optimal itineraries.
-There are 17,963 AC-operated flights in the 10 day period I'm looking at. That is a lot of combinations.

2. Cost cost cost. My algorithm optimizes for the maximum wings per hour. This is actually reasonable when you consider the cost of flights versus the cost of my time. However, you run into situations where an itinerary that earns 90% of the wings might be 50% the cost. Pricing out these itineraries is prohibitively slow, and likely expensive. When you consider a 9 day itinerary may need 7-9 tickets, and a query to the ITA QPX API is 3.5 cents, you can see how that might become an issue. Also, right now, my algorithm runs in memory, locally. Add a web service, and that 5 minutes might become 3 weeks. There are "free" ways of doing pricing queries, but it would be slower.

In my mind, (2) is the bigger issue, but it's also much harder to solve. That being said, if you want to factor cost in, then you might need to solve (1) to run through every itinerary, because a $1000 5 day itinerary that earns 50k wings might be better than a $2000 5 day itinerary that earns 80k wings - but that depends on personal circumstances.

YXXFlyer

Isn't this what AC entices us to do and they even get paid for it...

BlueMilk

CC: Are you looking for suggestions?

SparseFlyer

For #1, I am sure you have access to a supercomputer somewhere? Or at least a cluster you could ninja for a few hours over night?

For #2, if you can scratch out a bunch of useless itinerary, and/or limit to a limit in stops/ticket, I am sure you could come up with a reasonable sample of routes that need pricing. Once you have that, query them once, for each day. Then let the optimizer fetch the price from a saved table so it does query ITA every time it. I may not be understanding your algorithm at all, but what I understand is that during the optimization process, you will query too many times and it will cost too much moula. So if you query once and store the data, you won't query the same route multiple times. If you budget $500, at 3.5c/query, you could price over 14000 routes. How many routes do you need to price? I am sure you could "thin the heard".

canadiancow

Not 14,000 routes, 14,000 tickets. That's maybe 2000 total itineraries. And I'm not sure it's reasonable to assume they'd share enough for this to work. Obviously I'd cache results. Most likely is I'd take the top 1000 itineraries on a wings/day basis, then see if any are significantly cheaper than the rest.

But I'm worried that spending $500 would only save me $200