SUPER Beginner Here - How Do I Start Making a Simple Sales Route Mapping App?
Hi everyone,I’m a big fan of all the incredible tech and tools I’ve come across here, but I’ll admit, I’m a total beginner when it comes to building anything myself. That said, I’m really excited about the idea of creating a simple app to help me efficiently plan my daily sales routes.I picture something that lets me input a list of addresses, and the app would map out the most efficient driving route to save time and gas. Nothing too fancy—just functional and easy to use.Here are a few questions I have:What’s the best way for someone with very little coding experience to start a project like this?Are there any tools, frameworks, or tutorials you’d recommend?Would something like Google Maps API be a good starting point for this?Am I biting off more than I can chew as a beginner, or is this a reasonable project to tackle?Thanks in advance for any advice, resources, or words of encouragement. I’m eager to learn and start tinkering!ThanksSonny
2024-12-09T06:51:40Z
This is known as the travelling salesperson problem. If you Google finding approximate solutions using ML, that might be a start.However, in general, this is an unsolvable problem (ie it’s exponential cost in the number of possible route, but there are efficient approximate solutions).en.wikipedia.orgTravelling salesman problemIn the theory of computational complexity, the travelling salesman problem (TSP) asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?" It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, important in theoretical computer science and operations research.
 The travelling purchaser problem, the vehicle routing problem and the ring star problem a...
2024-12-09T07:23:27Z
Here’s an example :Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem with deep reinforcement learning on Amazon SageMaker | AWS Open Source Blog
2024-12-09T07:24:07Z
and here’s a research survey:The neural network methods for solving Traveling Salesman Problem - ScienceDirect
2024-12-09T07:56:51Z
Wow, this is intense—definitely a bit above my skill level, but I get the gist. My naivety is showing, guess I’ll keep at it as usual. On the bright side, at least I’m not relying on a Thomas Guide like when I first started traveling!Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my question.
2024-12-10T02:52:32Z
Just because the problem is theoretically intractable, it doesn’t prevent the approximate solutions from being good - or that using it as a test case to learn how to do machine learning is diminished. I definitely found it an interesting question. But yes, if you want something slightly simpler to cut your teeth on, then something that is more easily formulated as a Yes/No problem, and ideally can leverage pre-existing data sources for ground truth will be easier (think cat or not cat :)).