I heard on the radio last night that a mathematician tried to mathematically solve airline pricing. For one flight alone (American Airlines, Boston to San Francisco) he found 25 million different prices based on who you're buying it through, what time of day, availability, are you a frequent flyer, etc. Now I don't feel so bad that I can't figure out which day of the week is supposed to be cheaper to fly.
"'The problem was that all the different pricing rules interact in ways that not even those who designed the pricing systems could begin to fully understand. Mathematically, this made the (idealized) problem of finding an optimal fare between two given locations undecidable, which means that it is impossible to write a computer program to solve the problem." The crazy math of airline ticket pricing: http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_09_02.html NPR Math Guy: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1148496 -todd -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
