Fun with Algorithms

We discuss some of the problems Noah had to face when he established his famous bagel business; Noah had to decide how many bagels of each flavor should be produced in each of his bakeries, subject to space, production and flavor popularities constraints. Noah’s goal was to find solutions that maximize his revenue (the revenue problem) while guaranteeing satisfaction to his customers (the balancing problem). Noah showed that both problems are NP-Hard. He then looked at some special cases, where each of these problems can be solved optimally in polynomial time. Finally, he found a nearly optimal solution for the revenue problem that paved his road to success.