Computer scientist Randy Olson has answered big questions before – “What’s the quickest way to find Waldo,” for example – but this time he’s using his data tinkering to find the best road trip across Europe, if one wants to visit as many landmarks as possible in 2 straight weeks.
According to his optimized road trip map, you could visit 45 European landmarks in 2 weeks (assuming you don’t need a bunch of sleep).
Olson used custom algorithms and Google Maps to calculate the route, which added up to 16,287 miles and a total drive time of 14 days. He chose his destinations based on Business Insider’s list of places in Europe that you should visit in your lifetime, and it actually manages to hit most of the major historical monuments (along with some lesser-visited gems).
Though it does leave out a few that aren’t accessible by car…cause road trip.
Image Credit: Randall S Olson
He talked about the process on his blog:
“If you started computing this problem on your home computer right now, you’d find the optimal route in about 9.64 x 10^52 years—long after the Sun has entered its red giant phase and devoured the Earth. This complication is why Google Map’s route optimization service only optimizes routes of up 10 waypoints, and the best free route optimization service only optimizes 20 waypoints unless you pay them a lot of money to dedicate some bigger computers to it.”
He was able to take some shortcuts, since he’d written similar algorithms before, like the one he used to come up with the ultimate road trip across the U.S.
Olson also warns that even though his road trip does take just two weeks, you’d need more like 3 months to actually see the sights and, you know, eat and sleep.
So plan accordingly – but definitely go, people with the time and freedom and means. You won’t regret it.