James Webb Space Telescope and the Traveling Salesman Problem

How do you decide which stars the world's most expensive telescope looks at? This video introduces the Traveling Salesman Problem and some basic algorithms to solve it, attitude control and momentum management on the James Webb Space Telescope, and some key concepts of all optimization problems.

0:00 Intro
1:36 The Traveling Salesman Problem
6:08 Webb Momentum Management
9:41 Using the Universe as a Computer

Thank you to Caleb Birtwistle for captioning!

JWST Observation Planning:

[badguy]

I am stunned how deep the problem goes and the parallels of it to others. I liked the way you introduced the problem by an familiar question of shortest path.

[jayitsthenerdyninja]

I really hope you keep this up, your videos are SO AWESOME

[giladhr]

I really like your two newest videos! The way you connect different topics is really cool and interesting! Please keep going

[CircuitrinosOfficial]

A correction at 3:00
Because the routes are always a complete cycle, it doesn't actually matter which point you start at.
The actual equation for the number of possible unique routes is R(N) = (N-1)!
The equation you used is overcounting the possible routes by a factor of N.

Another way to look at it is you want to count the possible connections between cities and not the cities themselves.

[aaronmcdaniel]

I'm a machine learning researcher by trade who specializes in multi-objective optimizations. This was a great explanation and so enjoyable to watch, thanks for the content! I'm subscribed now

[johncosico]

your chanel is criminally underrated. Hope you keep this up!! Really entertaining vids so far hihi

[dariomendoza]

These videos level up the education we get from the internet. Sometimes I feel educational videos get stuck on appealing to general audiences.

[dittilio]

I'd love to see you do a video on P=NP. You have a fantastic way of going surprisingly in depth with your explanations while keeping it in view of more digestible examples. Your popcorn video being a shining example.

[blkzyhkishg]

Just wanted to say that you shouldn’t stop making videos! You have a great writing style and you break down hard concepts so well.

[jamesphillips]

3:00 Well played.

Once was trying to solve a visual challenge where you are supposed to draw a line crossing every line once. I Decided to try simplifying it before throwing a week of CPU time at it.

Once I was able to simplify the problem to a pentagon: I was able to prove it was impossible. Due to the odd number of sides any line starting inside will end up outside after crossing each side once. Since the figure I transformed in simplification had 3 pentagons, but the line has 2 ends: no solution is possible.

[donatoclemente]

You are one of my top science education youtubers now that I've gone through your channel. Absolutely amazing stuff.

[chetricker]

I seriously thank you. You are a gift from the gods. I'm on a optimization contest on wind turbines which involve optimizing both vibration damping and power generation and reading related papers i found out the Pareto front and I had no idea of what they were. Thank you so much

[bradarmstrong]

Great videos on your channel. Explaining a topic clearly and completely, without dumbing it down, is a real skill. Doing it in a way that turns out to be interesting, educational, and understanding is rare indeed. Keep up the great work!

[chancejewell]

I just finished work on a research project for TSP in communication networks. I would have never thought it would have an application like this… bravo

[marmight]

I found your channel an hour ago and now I’ve committed the rest of my day to watching all your videos. These are brilliant.

[mellowandblue]

super fun that you combine so many fields in one problem. like econ with pareto, optimization with minima, physics with the gears' momentum... i had a good time thank u

[rohanganapathy]

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[gort]

First time seeing a video from this channel and it was very nice. I liked the way you united so many different fields and still kept it cohesive. Very well explained, too.

[Etyenneuh]

Insanely easy to understand while subject pretty complicated
Thanks and nice work !!!

[duoquendo]

i like how you end every video with a lesson, this channel is worth my time