Full stack data scientist and AI researcher, Dr. Randy Olson, had some time to kill after getting snowed in on winter weekend and decided to use machine learning to create optimal search strategy for solving Where’s Waldo children’s books. He approached the pet project as a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) which asks “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?”
Dr. Olson “pulled out every machine learning trick in my tool box” to find Waldo and was pleased with the results. Not there long after, someone suggested Dr. Olson use the same algorithm to compute an optimal road trip across every U.S. state. Dr. Olson took up the challenge and decided to plan the trip using these three restrictions:
-The trip must make at least one stop in all 48 states in the contiguous U.S.
-The trip would only make stops at National Natural Landmarks, National Historic Sites, National Parks, or National Monuments.
-The trip must be taken by car and never leave the U.S.
50 major U.S. landmarks were chosen as inputs (one in each state excluding Alaska/Hawaii and including D.C. and two in California) and what came out on the other end is a truly epic roundtrip itinerary spanning 13,699 miles and 224 hours (9.33 days) of driving in total with the assumption of no traffic. Dr. Olson recommends budgeting 2-3 months to comfortably complete this ultimate roadtrip.
Absolutely love it when super informed people nerd out on the logistic details of leisure travel and share their insights for our benefit. Thanks to Dr. Olson, this is one hell of a roadtrip!
FIND DR. OLSON’S OPTIMIZED ITINERARY HERE
Here’s the full list of landmarks in order:
- Grand Canyon, AZ
- Bryce Canyon National Park, UT
- Craters of the Moon National Monument, ID
- Yellowstone National Park, WY
- Pikes Peak, CO
- Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM
- The Alamo, TX
- The Platt Historic District, OK
- Toltec Mounds, AR
- Elvis Presley’s Graceland, TN
- Vicksburg National Military Park, MS
- French Quarter, New Orleans, LA
- USS Alabama, AL
- Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, FL
- Okefenokee Swamp Park, GA
- Fort Sumter National Monument, SC
- Lost World Caverns, WV
- Wright Brothers National Memorial Visitor Center, NC
- Mount Vernon, VA
- White House, Washington, DC
- Colonial Annapolis Historic District, MD
- New Castle Historic District, Delaware
- Cape May Historic District, NJ
- Liberty Bell, PA
- Statue of Liberty, NY
- The Mark Twain House & Museum, CT
- The Breakers, RI
- USS Constitution, MA
- Acadia National Park, ME
- Mount Washington Hotel, NH
- Shelburne Farms, VT
- Fox Theater, Detroit, MI
- Spring Grove Cemetery, OH
- Mammoth Cave National Park, KY
- West Baden Springs Hotel, IN
- Abraham Lincoln’s Home, IL
- Gateway Arch, MO
- C. W. Parker Carousel Museum, KS
- Terrace Hill Governor’s Mansion, IA
- Taliesin, WI
- Fort Snelling, MN
- Ashfall Fossil Bed, NE
- Mount Rushmore, SD
- Fort Union Trading Post, ND
- Glacier National Park, MT
- Hanford Site, WA
- Columbia River Highway, OR
- San Francisco Cable Cars, CA
- San Andreas Fault, CA
- Hoover Dam, NV
ABOUT DR. OLSON:
Hi! I’m Dr. Randy Olson. I’m a full stack data scientist, AI researcher, and consultant based in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area.
I specialize in artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, and data visualization, and occasionally write about my latest work on my personal blog, where I’ve become known for computing optimal road trips around the world and solving Where’s Waldo?, among many other creative applications of machine learning. My work has been featured all over the world and in the news, including the New York Times, Wired, FiveThirtyEight, The Onion, and much more.
I work tirelessly to promote open and reproducible science, leading by example and openly publishing my work on GitHub and open access journals whenever I can. I’m also passionate about training the next generation of data scientists to be more efficient, effective, and collaborative in their work, and do so by writing online tutorials, recording video tutorials, teaching hands-on workshops, and mentoring local students in my research specialties.
