Frustration and simulation
Dietrich Stauffer · Physics World · 1999
Life is frustrating. One has to balance conflicting aims such as drinking to the bottom of a large glass of whisky with the wish to remain healthy The challenge is to optimize the situation by making a compromise. There are similar challenges in mathematics, such as the “travelling salesperson problem”: what is the shortest continuous line that connects a set of points (i.e. cities to be visited) on a plane (a map) and returns to the origin? Airlines face even more difficult optimization challenges when they try to schedule flights that meet passenger demand while consuming a minimal amount of fuel and not having all the planes end up at the same airport. Biological evolution is also thought to lead to the optimal compromise between how a living being is built and how it behaves.