Contribution team: Alibaba Cloud Marketing Department
In the Marvel movie "Reunion 3", Doctor Strange predicted that there are more than 14 million possibilities in the future, but there is only one victory. This only optimal solution becomes their hope of fighting. It's a pity that the ending of the movie was not so complete, and Thanos’ snap fingers destroyed half of the universe.
Whether it's a movie or a novel, the super ability to predict the future is always amazing. The self-developed mathematical programming solver MindOpt of Ali Dharma Institute seems to be a realistic version of "Doctor Strange", seeking the optimal solution among countless possibilities in the future. Unlike the science fiction movies themselves, this "superpower" of the "unexplored prophet" has become the "ultimate weapon" at the bottom of the intelligent decision-making scene, and is bringing perfect results to the decision-making and scheduling of all walks of life.
Unveil the "veil" of the ultimate weapon
What is a mathematical programming solver? The definition in operations research is to perform a large number of calculations for a variety of established linear, integer and various non-linear programming models to find the optimal solution. Simply put, it is to use mathematical problems to solve practical decision-making problems.
For example, during Double 11, the central warehouse needs to allocate goods to the sub-warehouses in various cities across the country in advance, which involves many variables and constraints. For example, each sub-warehouse has different demand and inventory, as well as transportation capacity, goods category, and time. And other issues. If the allocation is unreasonable, some cities will allocate too much goods and cause a backlog of goods, and some cities will cause a shortage of goods because of too little allocation, which will cause losses. At the same time, unreasonable transportation planning and inefficiency will also increase business costs.
The traditional way is to use the computer to find the best way to crack, not to mention the time-consuming, labor-intensive, low-efficiency and other problems, as far as the computer itself is concerned, there are errors. Don't underestimate an error. In the face of astronomical data, subtle errors can cause huge losses. Accuracy cannot be guaranteed, so how to get the optimal solution?
Such sophisticated computing requirements are precisely when MindOpt shows its "superpower". MindOpt can be easily done in two steps. The first step is to model tens of thousands or even millions of variables into a mathematical model to predict the various possibilities of future decisions; the second step is to input the mathematical model into the solver and optimize The algorithm automatically calculates the final result, so as to provide an optimal scheduling plan for the allocation of goods.
The "most powerful brain" of the scene "takes all"
In addition to cargo scheduling, what are the broader application scenarios for such a powerful "artifact"? In fact, it ranges from taxi dispatching, shop location selection, inventory optimization, to cloud computing resource scheduling, credit risk control and asset allocation in the financial industry, real-time power system scheduling, and even more complex scenarios such as industrial production and deep space exploration. , Can rely on the solver to build a mathematical programming model, and use the intelligent decision-making brain to find the optimal solution. For example, MindOpt has been applied to many Alibaba businesses such as cloud computing. Through the scheduling of millions of containers and tens of millions of computing power, it saves hundreds of millions of yuan in costs for Alibaba Cloud every year.
The "God Operator" who broke the world record twice
It goes without saying that none of the solver's technology, R&D, investment, cycle, etc. is a "fuel-efficient lamp", and there are only a handful of domestic teams with R&D capabilities. The MindOpt of Dharma Academy broke the world record twice. In the list maintained by Professor Hans Mittelmann of Arizona State University in the United States, it won the championship with a speed advantage of 10% faster than the second place. It is worth mentioning that this evaluation list has been established for more than 20 years and has always been the vane of international solver technology. Being able to stand out in the global competition of "masters" and top the list, can be called the "Oscar" in the solver industry.
On the Mittelmann list, MindOpt has successfully solved 40 linear programming problems with an average speed of 40 seconds per question. Each problem is derived from a classic industrial scene. The largest problem has 1.15 million variables and 750,000 Constraints. This means that if you rely on human calculations, not to mention the speed of solving the problem in 40 seconds, even if you use the power of the wild, I am afraid that you will have to calculate the "waste and old."
MindOpt is open to the whole society
In the past few decades, the core technology of high-end commercial solvers has always been dominated by European and American companies. For us, the high-performance solver is just a "black box". The DAMO Academy has completely opened this mysterious "mathematics black box", which can not only provide stable and fast intelligent decision-making capabilities for Chinese businesses, but also can be applied to industries that have greater requirements for security such as military, aerospace, and power grids. The better news is that MindOpt has been opened to the whole society at the beginning of 2021, becoming the first free and open commercial solver in China, allowing enterprises, universities, and individual users in need to easily access and deploy the solver, and bring the society to life. Come to greater value.
Currently, the DAMO Academy team is still developing more types of mathematical programming solvers. If the solution technology breaks through, the solution variables are exponentially increased, and the solution time is extremely compressed, and the future 1 trillion possibilities are predicted within 1 millisecond, what will happen?
Open the solver, math is not mysterious!
Dharma Academy scientist Wang Mengchang and Li Yongle jointly
opened this mysterious "digital black box" for us.
It only takes 7 minutes to easily get the world’s top mathematical problems,
let us enter the "predicting the future" solver.
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