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Road Coloring Problem Solved

Posted by kdawson on from the hard-but-not-complicated dept.

ArieKremen writes "Israeli Avraham Trakhtman, a Russian immigrant mathematician who had been employed as a night watchman, has solved the Road Coloring problem. First posed in 1970 by Benjamin Weiss and Roy Adler, the problem posits that given a finite number of roads, one should be able to draw a map, coded in various colors, that leads to a certain destination regardless of the point of origin. The 63-year-old Trakhtman jotted down the solution in pencil in 8 pages. The problem has real-world implementation in message and traffic routing."

9 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Bad timing. by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 5, Funny

    Unfortunately for him, a cheap, safe, mass-market flying car was announced an hour later.

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    Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
  2. Re:Yeah, yeah, First Post, but... by notgm · · Score: 3, Funny

    not fast, but reliable. if you don't care what time you get in to cleveland, this guarantees you'll never *end* up in pittsuburgh.

    wait, ohio to cleveland?

  3. Re:Actually by spookymonster · · Score: 4, Funny

    Actually, if he were to put it on a SD card, it'd take up less than 1 square inch...

    Where's my PEDANTIC:-1 option?

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    - Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
  4. Re:Night Watchman? by Yvanhoe · · Score: 5, Funny

    In Soviet Russia they say that because Americans were so poor mathematicians, they had to invent the computer...

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    The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
  5. Re:OK, but... by KDR_11k · · Score: 4, Funny

    Forty-two.

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    Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
  6. Re:Sign of a true Genius. by Jamil+Karim · · Score: 4, Funny

    The man is a True Genius. Real Men of Genius!
    Today, we salute you, Mr. former-nightwatchman-turned-mathmetician!
  7. I knew it! by Teilo · · Score: 4, Funny

    Proof at last, that that guy who kept saying, "You can't get there from here" is a bloody liar.

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    Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
  8. In related news .... by PPH · · Score: 3, Funny

    Based upon his ground-breaking research on the road coloring problem, night watchman Trakhtman has been promoted to the Department of Transportation pavement striping crew.

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    Have gnu, will travel.
  9. Re:Night Watchman? by Applekid · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's way better to be good at math, though, if you have to pick one. Sure, computers are quite practical for solving difficult problems, but you don't get nearly as much insight from simulation as you do from deriving an analytical formula for something (assuming such a formula is possible). True, but the math needed to draw one frame of Doom alone took me a week, and I still haven't finished filling the boxes on my sheet of graph paper.
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    More Twoson than Cupertino