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Bristol’s most epic pub crawl
What’s Bristol’s best pub crawl? Down the Gloucester Road starting at the Wellington? A gold star if you make it beyond the Arches. Along the cobbles of King Street? A shorter route but with more potent beers, especially the ‘crazy shit’ selection at Small Bar.
Or how about every single pub in the city?
Maths boffins have gone even further than that by working out the shortest route to visit every single pub in the UK, as found on the website Pubs Galore.
Led by Professor William Cook from the University of Waterloo in Canada, the two-year project is an example of the travelling salesman problem (TSP), which aims to work out the shortest route between any number of locations before then returning to the starting point – said to be one of the most intensively studied problems in computational mathematics.
The 45,495km tour of 24,727 pubs can be studied in detail on this interactive Google Map and is easily the largest road-distance TSP that has been solved to date, having more than 100 times more stops than any road-distance example solved previously by other research groups.
The Bristol leg of the epic pub crawl navigates its way across the city on an almost continuous blue line, with lines going off to visit the Prince of Wales and the Black Swan, almost next door to each other on Stoke Lane in Westbury-on-Trym; and further detours to visit pubs including the Maytree in Hartcliffe and the Bull on Crew’s Hole Road.
There’s even a trip on the cross-harbour ferry from the ss Great Britain to the Harbour Inlet for a trip to Spoke & Stringer, further ensuring that the route is as short as possible. Just remember if you’re planning to follow this leg of the route that the 90p ferry stops running at 6pm.
Bristol’s best pub crawl has just got even better.
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