The Knapsack Problem

Good Evening everyone, welcome back to our blog. Today was an exciting, action packed day! Today was one of our two big competitions. We were in a group with our roommates for the trip and had to compete against the other groups to win a prize.

But before we could start our challenge we had the great opportunity to listen to Len Testa. He wrote his graduate thesis on how to optimize his a trip to Disney and now his whole career is based off of that. He co-authors a book called "Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World" that is updated 4 times a year so it is always as accurate as it can be. Testa looked at the situation from a visitor's perspective; which involves giving rides and attractions value on the one factor that anyone could wrap their head around: wait times. He then went to explain how data is collected for the TouringPlans app that he designed. You could tell by his longer answers and related anecdotes that Len Testa is incredibly passionate about what he does and what he has done. This has been one of my favorite parts of the trip and I am happy we had this opportunity to speak to him.

Now it was time for the big competition we had all been waiting on. The competition is called the knapsack problem. The definition I found explains it like this "The knapsack problem is a problem in optimization. Given a set of items, each with a weight and a value, determine the number of each item to include in a collection so that the total weight is less than or equal to a given limit and the total value is as large as possible". Our problem was a little different we had 5 hours to get in as many rides as we could, but each ride was given a different points value. The weights are found in the picture below. We had to stay as a group and you could ride things multiple times but they were one point less each additional time you rode it.

The race took place as soon as the meeting ended, and boy, did it get intense FAST (haha). We as competing roommates were teasing and talking smack to one another on the way to the bus stop and while waiting for our bus From Animal Kingdom to Hollywood Studios. My(Brady) group started off with watching the MuppetsVision 3D show and once we were done we sang our hearts out at the Frozen Sing-Along. After that we decided to get serious so we went and did Smugglers run and to save time we all went into the single riders line so we didn't get to ride it together. Once we were done with that we had a fast pass for Toy Story mania and then we did Walt Disney Presents real quick. We felt like we had been pretty slow up to this point and we needed to make up some ground so we decided that since Star Tours was only a 10 minute wait that we should ride it three straight times, so we did that. Then to end it we tried Smugglers Run single rider line again and we could basically walk right on so we ended up being able to do that three more times before our time ran out. We ended up with 71 points and a slight headache. 71 was good enough for second place A.K.A first loser so that was disappointing but it was still a fun time. Room Belle (Emily Ketterer, Lauren Spina, Rebecca (Becca) Phillips, and I (Molly Snyder)) rode Rise of the Resistance, Toy Story Mania, Star Tours, MuppetVision 3D, Frozen Sing-Along, and attended the film Walt Disney Presents: One Man's Dream... ending with 44 points total (and coming in last place, but we had fun and took care of ourselves- snack and restroom breaks- in the process). The room of Jessica, Tiffany and Emily won the race! After we were done with that we had pizza as a group then heading back to our rooms.

Tomorrow is filled with more competition as we have the traveling salesman race! Come back tomorrow night to see how that one turns out!

Thanks,

-Molly and Brady