Last week I was in Montpellier (South of France) for the ROADEF conference. (French Operations Research Society). I attended many interesting talks and met also friendly customers and colleagues.

I gave a small presentation about Operations Research and puzzles where I tried to challenge the audience with some puzzle and some opinion.

In particular, I explained that in puzzles like in business problems both linear programming and constraint programming within CPLEX can help.

Puzzles help OR people to get better at solving real business problems or conversely solving real life OR problems is a good training for getting better and faster at puzzles ?

I did not fly back home. I took the train. And in the train I got an email from someone who was at my talk. The email was a puzzle:

The puzzle had nothing to do with trains. Nothing to do with buses and kids. I had to deal with a stubborn camel.

I later found this at many places over the web but here for instance.

The owner of a dateplantation has a camel. He wants to transport his 3000 dates to the market, which is located after the desert. The distance between his date plantation and the market is about 1000 kilometer. So he decided to take his camel to carry the dates. The camel can carry at the maximum of 1000 dates at a time, and it eats one date for every kilometer it travels.

This looked fun and I was in a train for 3 hours. So why not turning this into some good time and an opportunity to show again that relying on an abstract modeling language like OPL could help me solve this fast.

I later found out that there are smarter ways than relying on optimization. Same as sudoku and Einstein puzzle. But let’s try with OPL CPLEX.