This story begins with a comment from sigmaalgebra, an anonymous mathematician and avc regular. I appreciated Sigma’s explanation of theory enough to reproduce it here, because the discussion gets to the heart of estimation theory and it’s relationship with knowledge about statistical distributions.
A few weeks back I mentioned a well known resource minimization problem called the Traveling Salesman, and a far out “solution” to an analogous problem (scavenging) leveraging life. Graph theory is an area rich in algorithms which are designed to yield optimal, or more often good enough answers to problems which can’t be computed exhaustively1. In this morning’s riff I’ll explore similarities between shortest paths, current flow and capitalism and hopefully learn a little in the process.
If you’re a coder and in a hurry I included links to a couple of tools and how to use them at the end of the post