Typically when you manage to hit the last bar on a pub crawl, it’s the final stop of your night.
But if you make it to the last stop of a pub crawl mathematicians from the University of Waterloo in Canada just spent two years cooking up, we’re guess it’ll end up being the final stop of your life.
That’s because the pub, The Rodwell in Weymouth in the UK, is the 27,427th stop on the crawl.
Beginning at The Green Shutters in Portland, the 28,269-mile trek was designed by Professor William Cook and his team to help provide a real-world example of the “travelling salesman problem,” which tries to find the shortest route between locations before returning to the start.
While the team admits their walking crawl — which averages one stop per hour— left pubs out and that there are almost certainly shortcuts down alleyways that could shorten it, they assert their “UK Pubs tour is easily the largest such road-distance TSP that has been solved to date.”
As they point out, though the optimal tour is “a bit longer than the Earth’s circumference, you’ll find more food and drink along the proposed route than you would during a lap around the equator.”
Sounds like a jolly good way to spend every Saturday until the end of time.
Pub image courtesy of Tracy Lee Carroll via Flickr
Meet your guide
More Like This
Every Thursday, our resident experts see to it that you’re up to date on the latest from the world of drinks. Trend reports, bottle reviews, cocktail recipes and more. Sign up for THE SPILL now.
