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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."

2 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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  2. 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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