I understand that not giving the lower bounds effectively lets it find an arbitrarily low (generally very negative) number of coins that satisfy the problem (so the minimization would basically go to negative infinity).
But why would it respond with “to get 37 in the lowest number of coins I’ll give you 37 ones”?
Or is this kind of like “if the answer to your minimization problem is negative infinity, the answer is undefined behavior”?
Yes, it picked a valid result and gave up.
I got a similar nonsensical result in my run-ins[1] in with SAT solvers too, until I added a lowerbound=0.
The "real life" follow-up question in interviews was how to minimize the total number of intermediate rows for a series of joins within in a cost-based optimizer.
[1] - https://gist.github.com/t3rmin4t0r/44d8e09e17495d1c24908fc0f...
I used it to solve the new NYT game, Pips: https://kerrigan.dev/blog/nyt-pips
throwaway81523•1h ago
pkoird•1h ago