definitely interesting. My point was that scaling and constraint violation tolerance can only lead to polynomial complexity for NP-hard problems if this changes the overall problem you are solving or it kind of restricts the set of problem instances to a poly solvable subclass of the problem.

There cannot be any algorithmic setup which has polynomial complexity for an NP-hard problem (or do you mean expected runtime complexity?). interesting directions could be to bound the number of B&B nodes for specific problems something in line with this: doi.org/10.1287/ijoc...

We show that for integer problems calculating optimal CEs is Sigma_2^p-hard and provide solution algorithms which are able to solve instances in small dimension.

Essentially a counterfactual question applied to optimization problems asks: what is the minimal change in the problem parameters which would lead to a different but favored optimal solution?

Counterfactual explanations (CE) recently received increasing attention as a tool to provide explanations for the decisions of optimization problems; see e.g. Kurtz et al. (2025).

I think no real mathematician should ever be asked to come up with an application for their math. There should be a human right for this

Meanwhile on LinkedIn: „Academic operations research is useless since papers don’t study what is useful for Amazon“

But to be fair, this type of buzz-word repetition you also find at business schools without LLM use 😆

More information on our webpage: sites.google.com/view/row-ser...

But I mean the leading academics in the field are frequently debating the impact of AI (see e.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=144u...). We can discuss how realistic or smart some arguments are but at least there is a discussion. Never saw anything coming close to this in OR.

Very true, although at least in AI research people are more aware of societal/political consequences of their works. In OR people had some discussions in the 80s and after the neoliberal agenda took over it feels there is no discussion about the inherent OR ideology anymore..