[matharmin]

This feels like a marketing piece without any good content.

The way it's described, it's not a knapsack problem at all. The knapsack problem is to maximize the total value of the items you fit into the container.

In reconciliation, you presumably want to get the best matching between transactions, which is not defined here, and in any case is a completely different problem.

Ignoring the knapsack comparison, the article doesn't describe why you'd want to check each possible combination. Assuming the individual amounts are correct, you can do each batch separately - no need to check each combination within one batch with each combination of a different batch. (And if you drop that assumption, that still won't be a sensible thing to do).

I can imagine you can have a "scoring" algorithm that gives a confidence score for a match - then if you check every combination, you can pick the combination with the best overall score. But the article doesn't actually describe anything like that.

It also doesn't describe any alternatives to "AI". For example, what about a greedy algorithm? What about alternative methods to do address comparisons? I'm sure there are issues with those, but none of that is described here.

[jvanderbot]

I like to call this Rigor Theater.

Combinatorics: Check

Algorithms: Check

Real world problem: Check

Crowbarred connection between 1-3 to show how your AI algorithm is better? Check

[mtillman]

To your point, bank statement reconciliation (not the only kind of or even the most important type of financial reconciliation) is typically audited by scoring transactions against house financials which then buckets them into a few categories such as matched, no match, "FRAUD!", etc. Solutions to this use case (bank reco), often look more like recommendation engines as human auditors end up manually reviewing anything larger than a defined variance threshold. One area where M/L could make sense is to provide a high confidence suggestion around "FRAUD!" against a real-time stream of transaction data which I have personally worked on at a large bank-it was a long time ago (20 years) and the ROC curve wasn't impressive.

Disclaimer: OpenEnvoy provides real-time auditing & reconciliation solutions but in front of the ERP so we don't directly compete with MT.

[lukeasch21]

Very good points! I was a little confused about what this article was trying to show after taking an algorithms class, but I'm glad to know that I can somewhat justify my confusion (:

[benreesman]

If you’re in an algorithms class addressing either partial or 0/1 knapsack (or even a computation theory class getting into if and when to break out a SAT solver), listen to the professor and not anyone talking about AI.

[munificent]

Agreed completely. This is a fluff marketing piece with enough algorithms lingo thrown in to sneak it onto the front page of HN.