In my previous and first post about the electoral college, I tried to show how it is possible to get the necessary 270 votes to win the election in the college and do it winning the popular election in a minority of the states. Now we model the electoral college as a knapsack problem.
My approach was a bit simplistic (heuristic) and now I will show how to model the electoral college as an example of a very well-known problem in mathematical programming: the knapsack problem. In the knapsack problem, you want to fill the knapsack with a few items. Each item has a weight and some value to you, and you want to pack the knapsack with as much value as possible within the weight the knapsack (and your own back!) can hold.
I read his blog from beginning to end once and then just his Stock Series a second time. And then when I read the book I didn’t get much new (it was my third time reading the material after all) but the book is better organized (obviously) and is a bit more succinct (Collins tends to be a bit verbose in his blog), so if you read a few of his posts and they “click” then you may want to try and read the book. Also, having the book makes it easier to share with friends that could benefit from the knowledge (kind of part of my idea when I bought it).
