Anyone familiar with the travelling salesman problem will know that computers are not generally very good at route optimisation. This is not for want of processing horsepower, but because routing problems can be challenging to solve algorithmically.

A to B route-finding is a lot simpler, as the existence of my TomTom satnav system proves. However, the algorithms and heuristics employed in this kind of A-to-B planning are not very good at providing useful alternatives to the optimal path, for those occasions when the optimal path happens to have been dug up by the council.

At a Royal Institute of Navigation seminar this week I heard Alan Jones of a startup called Camvit (Cambridge Vehicle Information Technology) present his firm’s work on this real-world problem. Camvit has developed software capable of finding a range of good routes between A and B, rather than one optimised route.

As Jones explained, humans planning a journey - with an old-fashioned paper map - will tend to look first at the available trunk routes, selecting a few options and ignoring the fine detail until the major routes have been selected. They will thus tend to chose from a range of pretty-good routes, favouring known roads and avoiding known problem areas.

Jones cited the example of travelling from Cambridge to Manchester, where there are five distinct routes with very similar travel times, variously involving the A1, M1, M6, M62 or A1(M).

Satnav software, the AA’s online service or the likes of Google Maps will typically provide the user with just one route. Coarse adjustments are then typically possible, allowing the user to choose a route that goes via a particular point, or avoids particular roads, or goes via the shortest route, or avoids motorways. But these approaches tend to be very poor at providing a spectrum of routes with reasonable travel times.

Other adjustments tend not to help either. For a long journey, displaying the second, third, fourth and fifth best routes will typically create variation only in the fine detail of the route, at the local roads level near to the ends of the journey.

Altering the weighting factors (such as favouring distance over time) will also not necessarily throw up alternate routes. Jones noted that where a northern route is, say, 300km long, and takes exactly three hours to drive, an adjustment to the weighting will never find a southern route that is 301km long and takes three hours and one minute, even if there is a nice pub on the way.

After a lot of work, Camvit has come up with a clever approach called Choice Routes that it says is quite good at finding the kind of routes humans would spot.

It works by pre-calculating a vast set of conventional, optimised routes between points on the map. This process creates a unique, many-branched tree - sprouting out in all directions - for every point of interest on the map.

To calculate routes between two particular points such as Cambridge and Manchester, the software first compares the pre-calculated Cambridge tree with the prepared Manchester tree, and removes all routes that the two trees don’t have in common. Given that the branches of each tree will tend to be roughly radial, with the town of interest at the centre, typically there will be very few branches of any length that the two trees have in common.

“A surprising thing happens,” Jones said. “We find that there are a few long chains of marked roads, and the rest is noise.” These few points of obvious overlap are then used as seeds, forming the basis of the detailed routes that the software goes on to calculate. Play the above video to see how it works.

This turns out to create human-like solutions using a method that no human could employ - kind of like the exhaustive way in which computers compete with grand masters at chess.

There’s more to the choice of several good routes than meets the eye. Knowing that a range of routes is available also helps after you’ve set off on one particular route, because different routes will tend to have pieces in common. All five good routes from Cambridge to Manchester, for example, depart along the A14. The Choice Routes software is able to determine, therefore, these decision points: junctions at which the driver has the option to switch from one good route to another.

The driver can thus be alerted when these points crop up, choosing the route that seems best at the time. Or, with software connected to real-time traffic information, the Choice Routes software might give updated estimates of the best route in a much smarter way than current systems.

I also think there’s a big safety implication. From my own experience with a TomTom unit, I know that route switching is the time when the driver is most tempted to try to interact with the satnav while still driving. When leaving a motorway due to congestion, for example, TomTom will point you back onto the motorway until you can find a way to tell it not to, and there are seldom convenient places to stop. So anything that automates the business of realising that a driver wants to switch routes looks like a giant leap forward in safety to me.

Camvit aims to sell its system to the big navigation software suppliers. “If the techniques prove popular, we would hope to see Choice Routes become available as standard, or at least as a ‘give me choices’ button, in most journey planners,” Jones told me.

“The technology is protected by a patent application, and we are in advanced talks with several companies about their markets and pricing models,” Jones added. “We are always keen to hear from other companies that think the technique might be useful to them. Although our initial focus is on road journey planning for the individual driver, we are also keen to look at applications to public service dispatch of multiple vehicles, fleet management, traffic and travel planning of all sorts, and even systems as diverse as internet routing, pipework planning or integrated circuit layout.”

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the shortcomings of Google Maps and indeed any navigation system that places undue reliance on postcodes, which are designed to send parcels and envelopes to the right place rather than people, and so can lead you to a Royal Mail warehouse rather than to your destination of choice. I parted with a call for a national identity database for buildings.

Since then several people have pointed out that the database already exists: the National Land & Property Gazetteer (NLPG), which is compiled by the UK’s local authorities. It assigns a Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) to every address, including those to which letters are never sent. A British Standard (BS7666) sets out the system and is currently being revised.

All news to me. No doubt emergency services and the like are well aware of the NLPG and putting it to good use, but as a consumer-facing system it’s not exactly providing much return on the taxpayer’s investment. Do you know what the UPRN is for your office or home? Do you know where you can look it up? I don’t.

So it seems we’re a long way off from seeing a satnav product or Google Maps-style service that lets the user plug in the UPRN and be sure that they are heading for the right place.

Today I attended an event that dwelt on the future of satellite navigation, organised by the Royal Institute of Navigation (of which more later). It was attended by experts from a wide variety of backgrounds: from vendors to entrepreneurs to civil servants. I didn’t hear anyone mention NLPG, UPRNs or BS7666.

But then nobody mentioned Google Maps either, which suggests a certain blinkered polarisation of focus in the navigation community.

Maybe UPRNs will come to the fore in years to come because, as I argued at the start, they are actually needed.

Ever wondered why a CD, and thus all the CD-ROM and DVD derivatives, has a 12cm diameter? OK, you probably haven’t, but I have.

I had assumed that this fundamental dimension came about through an engineering compromise based on data densities, linear velocity at the laser reading head, and other immutable physical constraints.

It turns out the truth is a little more prosaic.

Dutch engineer Kees Immink, one of the engineers working for Philips in the team that collaborated with Sony to develop the Compact Disc format, states that Philips’ top brass wanted the new format to be comparable in size to the compact cassette - presumably a marketing requirement. The CD team took this edict to the max by borrowing the very biggest cassette dimension - the 11.5cm diagonal across its face. As Immink explains, with the data densities then feasible for mass-produced players, this gave a suitably round playing time of one hour.

Sony, no doubt with portable players in mind, initially wanted a smaller 10cm disc. So how did we end up with a compromise that was bigger than either starting point?

The 12cm CD has a playing time of 74 minutes, which according to Philips’ official history, was determined by a particular piece of music.

“Sony vice-president Norio Ohga, who was responsible for the project, did not agree [with the 11.5cm specification]. ‘Let us take the music as the basis,’ he said. He hadn’t studied at the Conservatory in Berlin for nothing. Ohga had fond memories of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony [and] that had to fit on the CD ... a check was made with Philips’ subsidiary, PolyGram [which said] the longest known performance lasted 74 minutes ... This therefore became the playing time of a CD. A diameter of 12 centimetres was required for this playing time.”

Only that’s a little too neat.

Back to Immink again, talking to Irish newspaper the Sunday Tribune in October 2005:

“Philips owned Polygram, one of the world's largest distributors of music. Polygram had set up a large experimental CD disc plant in Hanover, Germany, which could produce huge amounts of CDs having, of course, a diameter of 11.5cm. Sony did not yet have such a facility.
If Sony had agreed on the 11.5cm disc, Philips would have had a significant competitive edge in the market. Sony was aware of that, did not like it, and something had to be done.
The long-playing time of Beethoven's Ninth imposed by Ohga was used to push Philips to accept 12cm, so that Philips' Polygram would lose its edge on disc fabrication.
It was all about the money and competition in the market, and not about Ohga's great passion for music.”

So there you have it. The 12cm size was a compromise based on arbitrary marketing concerns, honed through a process of infighting and back-stabbing among consortium members.

If I’d really thought about it, I guess I should have known that from the very start.

Right, it’s lunchtime and I’m off to buy some draft 802.11n gear...

You may have heard the news that the UK leads the world in the export of “ideas and knowledge”. I saw it covered on the TV news, and in The Guardian, and the story comes from a paper produced by The Work Foundation, a not-for-profit campaigning body that aims to “find the best ways of improving both economic performance and quality of working life”. Man.

It’s easy to assume that this kind of transition is all to the good, because removing pesky manufacturing and abolishing the need to ship actual physical goods offshore will somehow insulate the UK from harsh economic upheavals.

That’s not true, of course. Because things are Complicated.

Take IT Week, for example. It is a publication written, published and printed in the UK for a UK audience, and even online is intended for UK consumption (as the .co.uk address suggests). So you may be surprised to learn that the real business model for IT Week is actually, basically, to export to the US.

That’s because IT Week is all ideas and knowledge, but is funded by advertising. Most of the UK IT industry’s ads are placed by IT vendors based in the US, hoping to sell to European customers. And even if that advertising is booked by UK agencies, or UK subsidiaries, or European operations, eventually the bills and the budgets will be recorded on somebody’s balance sheet in US dollars and cents. Eventually, through the chain of budgeting and billing, we are exporting advertising space to the US.

When the dollar is weak, advertising in a UK paper starts to look expensive. It might not be obvious, or instant, but the dollar-sterling exchange rate hits home eventually in the knowledge economy just as it does in the export of Dyson vacuum cleaners. Bills that lead back to the UK will currently look expensive when converted to dollars whatever you spend them on.

So while the UK’s conversion to the export of knowledge rather than, say, cars and motorbikes may or may not be a good thing, there is a certain level on which it changes nothing at all.

A retired family member has just “joined the 21st Century”, as she put it, and bought a computer. Actually I bought it for her, after quite a bit of searching. The budgetary requirements were tight. With just £500 to spend she wanted a laptop (rather than a desktop to avoid unwanted “cables and clutter”); a large screen (because she no longer has the eyesight of a teenager); a big keyboard (because she’s a speedy touch-typist); and a printer capable of producing professional-quality letters.

I also wanted Windows XP, rather than Vista, because I felt better able to troubleshoot remotely - she lives a three-hour drive away. That’s assuming you could get a Vista machine for under £500 that wouldn’t drive you nuts with its sloth.

Oh, and she also wanted a three-year warranty that would cover repairs if she dropped the laptop.

Having initially assumed the brief was unworkable, I did succeed in the end. Fortunately, music and video editing were not on the agenda. Colour printing also wasn’t an issue. She just wanted to get online, browse the web, write letters, and send emails.

In the end I chose an Acer Aspire 7112WSMi running Windows XPE Media Center Edition. The hardware offers a 17-inch screen, a chugging Intel Celeron M420 1.6GHz processor, 512MB RAM, a 120GB hard drive and DVD±RW. It cost £369.97 from Ebuyer.com.

This seems to be a fantastic machine for the money, with a big, bright screen and superb keyboard - identical to that of a top-spec Acer I have on loan from the firm, that retails for five times as much. The 7112 also boasts a little swivelling web-cam built into the screen bezel, plus Wi-Fi (which I’ve switched off). My relative was astounded to learn that the laptop can play CDs and DVDs - I haven’t yet explained that it can record them as well.

The Acer came with a bundled copy of Norton Internet Security 2006 and three-month subscription. This is too much of a resource hog for a slow machine, so I sent it straight to the recycle bin, replacing it with Grisoft's free anti-virus. I then installed the word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation components of OpenOffice.

Alongside the laptop I plumped for a Samsung ML2010 monochrome laser printer from the same online retailer, at £44.98. This seems to fit the bill, producing crisp pages for those prepared to wait a while and stick their fingers in their ears.

A three-year accidental-damage extended warranty from Acer cost another £85.36, including a bundled optical mouse and laptop bag. This brought the whole lot in just 31 pence over budget.

Incidentally I had worried that Ebuyer looked a bit too cheap to be true, but everything turned up in good condition, on time and as described, with no hidden extras.

I hope selecting the gear will be the hard bit, but it probably won’t be. My relative’s previous computer experience sounds suspiciously like writing business letters on a PC running DOS. Moving straight to a modern laptop from that must be a bit like trying to pole-vault after having once stuck a cocktail stick into a sausage. As my relative put it - in an email to me today - “This machine is full of deliberate ploys to bewilder me! There is such impenetrable jargon coming up sometimes I haven't a clue what it's all about; sometimes it asks me to sign here or do I want to join this or that, so I say no to everything.”

Well, welcome to the 21st Century indeed, where saying “no” is probably the most vital lesson to learn.

As any IT project manager will happily confirm, if you take an information system designed for one purpose and then wrap it up and try to use it for another, unrelated purpose, you will soon find out that life is not as simple as you had hoped. There will always be small, non-obvious exceptions to the rules that you blithely assumed would apply...

I was late for an appointment at The Dorchester - the posh hotel overlooking Hyde Park. It’s walking distance from my desk in Soho but Mayfair is a maze and time was tight, so I wanted to be reminded of exactly where on Park Lane it sits. I turned to the trusty Google Maps service. Which turns out not to be so trusty.

Searching for “the dorchester hotel” brings up two candidates: “A” being the famous Dorchester Hotel of Beverley Road, Hull, plus the other, evidently lesser-known Dorchester that I was after.

Clicking on “B” brought up a confirmatory picture of the correct façade, so I zoomed down to a suitable resolution to show the hotel’s locale.

And was a bit surprised to find myself looking at Rathbone Place, round the corner in Soho, rather than a prime piece of Mayfair.

I happen to know that the Google Maps arrow is actually pointing to a Royal Mail warehouse. This is probably because Google Maps gives The Dorchester’s postcode as W1A 2HJ. I think this actually functions as a sort of PO box. You’ll get the same result, incidentally, if you put IT Week’s published postcode of W1A 2HG into Google Maps. That postcode is used to divert bulky parcels away from our plate-glass entrance on Broadwick Street. The actual physical postcode for our office is W1F 8JB.

Similarly, The Dorchester’s actual postcode, helpfully retrieved from its customer-facing web site, is W1K 1QA.

I wonder how many people are being sent to Royal Mail outposts by putting too much faith in Google Maps and its flawed postcode system? The same error will of course be made by any digital map relying on postcodes - my TomTom GPS system makes the same mistake.

Forget the national ID card system, we need a proper national digital address system designed for people, not parcels. 

IT Week’s green blog underwent a rebranding last month, ditching the appealing, workmanlike name Green Business News and becoming the BusinessGreen Blog.

The reason behind this change is that we wanted a unifying brand to tie together the different pieces of eco-focused work we are doing across the various Incisive VNU business publications. IT Week had its Green Business News, sister title Computing had its Green Computing initiative, and other Incisive publications also have similar plans. We felt such efforts could be strengthened with a new, overarching label that (a) could stand on its own independent of either title and (b) didn’t limit us by having “News” in it.

We came up with BusinessGreen and we are already using the new name in earnest. For example, IT Week and Computing are collaborating on a series of video web seminars under the BusinessGreen umbrella. You can check out the first and second broadcasts via the audio/video pages of the IT Week and Computing web sites.

The first BusinessGreen web seminar, presented by Computing’s Bryan Glick, covered the business case for green computing; the second seminar, presented by IT Week’s James Murray, looked at steps IT departments can take to reduce their environmental impact. The next seminar will take place on Wednesday 20 June 2007 at 3.00pm - register ahead of time and you can participate by submitting live questions to the panel of experts. The session will look at how firms can demonstrate their environmental credentials to the world to improve their image, retain customers and attract new business.

I’m particularly, childishly pleased with the BusinessGreen logo, which was designed by me and IT Week art editor Kevin Williams. We wanted a logo that tied in with the environmental message of the brand but that avoided cheesy leaves or fields or trees or blades of grass, and that wasn’t uniformly coloured green.

After trying a vast number of typefaces and colours and coming up with a vast number of duds, we felt we were really getting nowhere. Then I happened to be sitting in a meeting one Monday morning, looking at a printed handout, and noticed that the capital letter G in Arial font - G - looks a bit like a circular arrow. The other notable circular arrow in common use is of course the increasingly familiar recycling symbol.

At that moment we had our logo concept, and Kevin got to work on designing a letter G that would function naturally as both a letter and a circled arrow. Once we were happy with that, the rest of the logo came together as easily as fitting the last two pieces in a 1000-piece jigsaw.

I’m particularly pleased that we have come up with a logo that is a bit of an homage to the famous FedEx logo, with its delightful hidden arrow (inside the EX), which is one of my favourite pieces of visual design. Not everyone spots the arrow in the FedEx logo right away, and similarly some people don’t notice the recycling symbol in the middle of the BusinessGreen logo until it’s pointed out. I love that little element of surprise and delight.

However, unlike the Olympics 2012 logo design team, Kevin and I don't seem to have been paid half a million quid. Some mistake, surely...

At a recent event I ran into Michelle Dewberry, winner of The Apprentice TV show last year. I managed to chase her away within about five minutes by asking too many questions about the aftermath of the show: the fiasco with the XenonGreen.com registration and her decision to part company with Sir Alan Sugar’s company. No doubt she's entirely fed up with nosy journalists raking over the past.

She's actually extremely convincing when talking about her new venture, MDL, which offers outsourcing consulting. I think I understand better now why she won. She has a lot more gravitas in person than came across on the small screen.

But I still think Xenon Green could have been better handled. Her account of why the XenonGreen.com domain went to someone else was a little skewwhiff. She told me a member of the TV audience broke a confidentiality agreement - but the domain was registered by someone with no connection with the show, on the day the BBC put out a press release mentioning the new brand. The inelegant truth is clearly that Amstrad just cocked up, neglecting to register the name while it was still a secret (perhaps it’s telling that her new MDL venture doesn’t seem to have a web site at all). And after the best Xenon Green domains were gone, Amstrad did nothing to get them back, grabbing lame alternatives like XenGreen.com instead.

Dewberry confirmed that she simply ignored emails from Andrew Potts of Beckbury Technology, owner of the then freshly registered XenonGreen.com and .co.uk domains, whereas it seems to me that it would have been good business to at least open a dialogue.

Never mind. As it turns out, Amstrad’s Viglen subsidiary chose not to pursue the full Xenon Green business plan, which centred on charging companies to recycle their e-waste. Dewberry left to set up on her own after just four months, in September last year.

I asked Dewberry if the recycling idea had been shelved too soon, given the current upsurge in interest in all things green, and the legal requirement for firms to be WEEE-compliant from next month. Viglen itself is one of many firms now offering to responsibly dispose of kit for a small charge. She surprised me by taking an opposite stance. It's now too late to build a new business on rubbish, she said, adding that the big IT suppliers will swallow what little profit there is in the task. Given the PR value of eco-programmes such as Dell’s declaration that it wants to be “the greenest technology firm on Earth”, this is probably a reasonable assessment.

I wonder what the winner of this year’s Apprentice will be doing in 12 months’ time?

Back in April, IT Week reader John McCormac argued that the Euro top-level domain would probably peak in popularity on the anniversary of its founding, on 7 April.  “The number of UK-based .eu registrations has been dropping like a stone since the beginning of the month as domains registered in the initial rush come up for renewal,” he wrote back in the first week of April this year.

I tend to agree that .eu is unlikely to challenge the ubiquitous .com or the well-established .uk. I don’t think many businesses are seeing much benefit in having a European web identity, and I certainly don’t see many services being advertised in the UK with a .eu address.

As McCormac pointed out, on 5 April 2007 the number of UK-based .eu registrations stood at just over 441,586. By 11 April the number had fallen to 420,077 - a drop of nearly five percent in just six days.

I’ve kept a vague eye on the stats since then. By 2 May 2007, the UK’s tally had fallen to just 346,278 - about 22 percent down in under a month.

From there, the tally has inched up again. On 5 June it stood at 351,077 and today it’s at 351,876 - still a long way down from the peak. I’ll continue popping back in the future to see if the figure keeps climbing, levels off, or even falls again. My guess is that the domain will not see sustained, long-term growth in UK registrations until we do something to make us all feel more European - like ditching sterling and adopting the euro.

Which, given current political leanings will happen sometime never.