Discrete Optimization

Even if you're not currently interested in discrete optimization, halfway into the course you are likely to loose your sleep over thinking of how to optimally solve Travelling Salesman Problem with 33810 cities or optimally color a huge random graph.

Even though I did know nothing about optimization at the beginning, this course managed to teach me many important aspects of discrete optimization.

Discrete optimization turned out to be a very exciting, fantastic and engaging course.

This course would probably also make you a better programmer overall due to the assignments that require from you to constantly improve on your code (so its not only discrete optimization, in a way its code optimization as well).

A considerable part of the course is implementing some tough discrete optimization tasks which are evaluated competitively against other participants.

Discrete optimization is a quasi-self-paced programming course offered by the University of Melbourne through Coursera that is all about solving hard problems.

Discrete optimization is challenging course with great programming assignments that introduces many different tools and leaves them on the table for you to play with.

I give discrete optimization 4 out of 5 stars: Very Good.

Al in all, I can say that this course really thought me something about discrete optimization, and I would love to learn even more about this interesting field.

Brilliant examination of the basic central aspect of discrete OptimizationI found the projects to be enjoyable and challenging I elected to not use libraries to make my solutions.

This course presents a variety of discrete optimization problems to be solved.

It is very well explained and it goes through a lot of topics in discrete optimization, giving a good theoretical and experimental basis.The assignments are hard but very rewarding when you complete them.

Good Course, I had learn a lot of concept of optimization The most challenging course that I've ever enrolled in.

Although having worked with optimization for a few years, I could learn a lot from this course.

I recommend trying to achieve 10/10 score, it may be very hard but you can learn a lot.

I love it so much.

I had a blast learning, and thank you so much for offering this course on coursera.

Thanks a lot to the instructors for putting so much effort in preparing it!

One can gain so much clarity on the subject by listening to the terrific tutor.

The bottom line is that if you are interested in learning about discrete optimisation and are motivated enough to spend the fairly significant amount of time and effort required, then you simply couldn't ask for a better course than this - thanks so much to the course staff for making this amazing course available on Coursera!

Thank you so much, looking forward for more from the creators!

So far I have completed seven or eight courses on Coursera, and although I have enjoyed them all very much, Discrete Optimization by Pascal van Hentenryck is my absolute number one!!

Also, proffesor Pascal Van Hentenryck is an awesome lecturer and his explanations are short, clear and easy to understand.

Pascal Van Hentenryck is one of the top researcher in this field and he has some great pedagogy skills.

The professor, Pascal Van Hentenryck, is extremely energetic and passionate about the subject.

I am sure this is the best course out there to help students/Professionals to understand the complexity of the optimization problems specially designed and explained by Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck in his own hilarious style .

But it is much harder to find a class that discusses local search heuristics, and this class may be unique in its focus on actually solving very tough examples of classic DO problems "by any means necessary."

My keywords: branch and bound (knapsack); iterated greedy, CP, cliques (graph coloring); simulated annealing, k-opt, clustering, lin-kernighan heuristic (travelling salesman); MIP, nearest-neighbors, LNS (facility location); MIP with subtour elimination, lazy constraints, nearest-neighbors, greedy as initial solution, local search, cluster-first route-second (vehicle routing).

Discrete optimization opens with an introductory lecture series on the knapsack problem that lasts a couple of hours followed by three longer lecture series, covering constraint programming, local search and mixed integer programming.

Most of the times the classical approaches like Mixed Integer programming and Constraint Programming fail to provide solution in a reasonable time.But that's when you become of intuitive developing your own ideas/ heuristics.This course covers a lot of optimization concepts like dynamic programming, Constraint Programming ,Mixed Integer programming and Local search.Waiting for the next one!..

We use the techniques (Dynamic Progrmaming, Local Search, etc) to solve those NP-complete problems.

If you have a background in maths and programming and are willing to settle for an 'ordinary' statement of accomplishment, it need not be so hard and time consuming at all.

The homeworks are hard, time consuming but very challenging.

Getting distinction is significantly more difficult and time consuming and will often require many iterations of work improving your first solutions.

The programming assignments are hard and time consuming but also very fun.

This level of freedom is great for students who want to work ahead but it may make it difficult to complete the course if you don't plan ahead because the programming assignments can be very time consuming.

Give me a great fundamentals of discrete optimization and make me think how to solve many classical hard problem as Traveling salesman Problem and Vehicle routing problem.

Excellent Course, I would highly recommend for all algorithmist and programmers.

I highly recommend this course to all the people who desire the basic knowledge about NP-hard problem, and optimization thought.

They are not kidding about the time commitment, but if you can make the time for it this is an incredible course - highly recommend great lesson should be a little bit more programming friendly The class is great.

One of the best courses I've done on Coursera.PS : to all who is just starting this course - embrace yourself, the ride is gonna be though but it's woth it!

One of the best courses I've ever taken, including all my main studies in three different universities.