Travelling Santa Problem: Optimization of a Million-Households Tour Within One Hour

Finding the shortest tour visiting all given points at least ones belongs to the most famous optimization problems until today [travelling salesman problem (TSP)]. Optimal solutions exist formany problems up to several ten thousand points. Themajor difficulty in solving larger problems is the required computational complexity. This shifts the research from finding the optimum with no time limitation to approaches that find good but sub-optimal solutions in pre-defined limited time. This paper proposes a new approach for two-dimensional symmetric problems with more than a million coordinates that is able to create good initial tours within few minutes. It is based on a hierarchical clustering strategy and supports parallel processing. In addition, a method is proposed that can correct unfavorable paths with moderate computational complexity. The new approach is superior to state-of-the-artmethods when applied to TSP instances with non-uniformly distributed coordinates

An Evangelical Approach to the Problem of Knowing and Doing the Basic Principles of Christian Conduct

In the declaration of Jesus, at the conclusions of His great Sermon on the Mount, there are two words that merit special attention, heareth and doeth . The problem of determining right and wrong is of an extremely serious nature because few people recognize the contrast between the secularized standards of the age and the moral principles of Christianity. In America particularly, both those in the church and those outside its fold harbor the vague illusion that the common life of man is Christian. This should be problem enough. Yet it is with deep concern that this author has noted definite discrepancies in evangelical Christianity as to the problem of right and wrong conduct. What one evangelical Christian would preach as wrong, the other would practice as right. Thus the question arose as to whether or not there were some positive principles which an evangelical Christian could deduce which bring a sense of sustainability to Christian ethical thinking. The purpose of this study was to discover consistent evangelical Christian principles for determining ethical values, and to ascertain how these Christian principles can be communicated to the individual to motivate and guide him to proper choice. The problem of this paper evolved from the everyday life of mankind. Because of this personal nature, the writer of this thesis felt not only justified in presenting his justification in a less formal manner, but felt he could more adequately express his feeling with his one-sided conversation

A History of the Montana Conference of the Evangelical Church

As the population moved westward the church sent missionaries to keep its constituency together. The Evangelical Association Church, through the Dakota conference, tried to keep its people together in the state of Montana. The United Evangelical Church, through the Platte River Conference, tried to keep pace with its people who homesteaded in the Broadview vicinity