# The Ultimate Bar Crawl: Mapping the Shortest Route to 82,000 Pubs in South Korea

## The Ultimate Bar Crawl: Mapping the Shortest Route to 82,000 Pubs in South Korea

Imagine the ultimate bar crawl. Not just a few blocks, not even a single city, but an entire country. A team at the University of Waterloo has tackled that very challenge, albeit theoretically. They’ve applied complex mathematical principles to calculate the shortest possible walking route to visit 81,998 bars scattered across South Korea.

The problem, known in computer science circles as the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP), is a notoriously difficult one. It asks: Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? With only a handful of cities, the solution is relatively straightforward. But as the number of cities increases, the computational complexity explodes, making finding the absolute shortest path a daunting task.

The University of Waterloo’s team, leveraging advanced algorithms and significant computing power, has made impressive progress in approximating the optimal solution for this gargantuan bar crawl. While the actual route is not explicitly laid out for would-be patrons, their work provides a fascinating glimpse into the power of computational mathematics and its application to real-world, albeit whimsical, problems.

Beyond the sheer fun of imagining traversing South Korea in search of the perfect soju, this project highlights the relevance of TSP in various fields. From optimizing delivery routes for logistics companies to planning efficient circuit board layouts, the principles underlying this Korean bar crawl problem have practical applications that touch our daily lives.

So, while booking flights and packing your walking shoes for the definitive South Korean pub experience based on this algorithm might be a bit impractical, it’s inspiring to know that even seemingly impossible problems can be tackled with ingenuity and the power of mathematical modeling. Just remember to hydrate, pace yourself, and perhaps bring a designated driver – or a team of mathematicians!