Advanced Problem Solving - ala Microsoft Solver Foundation

[DanielHutchison]

Hi all,

Msft has a "Microsoft Solver Foundation" (Microsoft Solver Foundation - Customer Technology Preview - Home) which produces "Solver". Solver (used primarily in excel) allows you to build equations and then solve for the unknown variables, given a desired output. This is particularly useful for finance problems where multiple variables are used and the same variable is used to multiple different exponents in different parts of the equation (making it very difficult to solve for except by simply trying lots of random inputs which solver somehow intelligently manages).

Essentially, one of the nice things it does is that you tell it which variables to change, and what conditions you want the output variable to meet: (Ie. min possible, max possible, equal to a specific value). The software is smart enough to play with the values and work out what convergence of the input factors causes the output result you are hunting for.

Now... it would be awesome if something like this existed that worked on my LAMP box. I will be running thousands of these problems daily, dynamically on request, so it can't be a resource hog. Has anyone come across such a piece of software?

Thanks,
Daniel

[Jonathan183]

Welcome to the forums Daniel

You may find this useful ... also look at the links at the bottom of the page.

[DanielHutchison]

Thakns Jonathan!

Hilarious- this is the exact same software as Solver but for Calc instead of Excel. The input forms even look the same!

I'm not sure if this is the final optimal solution to my problem as I definitely don't want every request to open an instance of Calc, even as a background process, because of resource constraints. I realized that I underestimated my number of requests- thousands of "tasks" a day- but each making 100+ calls to the Solver.

I've never actually used Calc, so I'll dig into it to see if I can solve my problem without the full overhead of firing it up for every call.

Thanks again for directing me toward it!

Anyone with any other suggestions?

[Jonathan183]

I was not quite sure what you were after ... as well as the Openoffice solver (which I think is still being developed rather than a finished work) there were some external resources on the link which are likely to be of more interest for your application by the sounds of things. I've only used something which works with a spreadsheet or integrated as part of a larger package such as chemical process modeling ... but calc solver does not sound like the solution for you.

[joberon]

Hi all,

Msft has a "Microsoft Solver Foundation" (Microsoft Solver Foundation - Customer Technology Preview - Home) which produces "Solver".
...

Being part of the Solver Foundation team, I feel obliged to make a point of clarification: our framework is a brand new 100% .NET 3.5 managed code solution written completely in-house, and is not a port or migration of any older system.

We don’t want to take credit for any existing legacy system.