Anish Athalye shares his experience planning and executing an optimal trail trace on San Francisco's Angel Island using the Chinese postman problem algorithm to minimize total distance while covering all 19.4 miles of unique trails. He built a web app for trail selection, implemented a route optimizer, and refined scouting techniques using heat maps and satellite imagery across multiple test runs before completing the 24.6-mile run in about five hours.
Background
The Chinese postman problem is a classic combinatorial optimization problem that finds the shortest closed path visiting every edge of a graph at least once, widely used in routing and logistics applications.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Sep 21, 2026 at 11:13 PM
- Score
- 5.0 / 10