Literally programming my holidays

This year I asked my boss for having 3 weeks of holidays in August. I got it, and the idea was spending 1 week in Alicante (I can’t miss Elche’s festivals). For the other 2 weeks, a trip to somewhere in Europe could be nice.

The first idea I had was an interesting option to combine three things: traveling in Europe, practicing English and playing Go. I wanted to participate in the Isle of Man Go Congress, which is a Go event, held during a week in the remote Isle of Man, a small island in the Irish Sea, where I’m sure I’m not going to find any Spaniards (which is better if I pretend to speak only in English). A Go tournament in the mornings, and events and trips in the evenings. I was looking forward to this, but unluckly I discovered they organize it only every 2 years. What a shame! 🙁

So, I have to activate “plan B”, which is taking my backpack and visit some cities in UK, trying to visit some Go clubs (for socializing and, of course, playing). It could be interesting to spend a couple of days in each city. The problem is how can I optimize my trip, to visit a lot of cities, and to enjoy meeting with the local Go players?

Luckily, I discovered a map (based on Google maps) in the British Go Association website, with information of a lot of clubs, including the meeting day. The best thing is that, to feed the map with info, they have created an XML file with clever marks for every chunk of info. Excellent!

So, having that dataset, I only need to create a program (in fact, a modified version of the classical Salesman algorithm problem) that calculates the better route: which cities to visit, without traveling a lot of Km, and playing Go every 2 days (at least)… let’s see how my computer suggests my holidays!