[xmonkee]

First of all, very impressive :) I AM a techie and I would never have come up with this solution, because I would have become obsessed with how the software knows it's running another instance and trying to hack that.

Second of all,

>These searches can take 12+ hours to run

WTF. What are these searches doing?

[tboughen]

Thank you!

The searches are trying to allocate groups of teachers to time slots, subject to the inputted constraints e.g. their students aren’t elsewhere, changing rooms are available if needed, a teacher hasn’t been allocated a different class already etc.

But I can’t tell the software which constraints are hard, which are soft, and which have alternatives we are indifferent about. Hence the need for parallel searches!

[neurostimulant]

This is basically traveling salesman type of problem called Constraint Programming. Plenty of library in this space if this interest you, like OR-Tools: https://developers.google.com/optimization

[_joel]

> >These searches can take 12+ hours to run

> WTF. What are these searches doing?

This is why you're a techie ;)