Although Abigail is correct (NP complete problems like this one have no efficient solutions for large sets of data), you still can create software which runs it fast.

At least there are two ways to improve it:

  1. implement and algorithm which is smarter than branch-and-bound. A lot of work, requires sufficient education in programming techniques.
  2. exchange required computation force with memory consumption. Use Memoize (by MJ Dominous) on KNAP and you'll see the the speed become linear and memory consumption grow exponentially... In some cases, you may be able to buy a sufficient amount of memory to replace unrealistic time to wait. (for instance, for stock calculations, minutes may already be too long to wait)

In reply to Re: Help with attempting to solve cutting stock problem (knapsack) by markov
in thread Help with attempting to solve cutting stock problem (knapsack) by stu96art

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.