The careful reader will notice an extended metaphor. The goal of the game is to associate each red card with the corresponding blue card-and it can be played in “easy mode” as a matching game or in “hard mode” as a matching + memory game. The game consists of two sets of cards: a red set containing the elements of an optimization model and a blue set containing the modeling constructs and data structures typically used when building a model in Gurobipy, Gurobi’s official Python interface. And now, to demonstrate we’re not anything like your grumpy grandpa, we strike again with our brand-new Gurobipy Card Game. We have already used this concept with great success in our Burrito Optimization Game. One way to achieve this is through gamification-applying game-playing elements that encourage engagement. That’s why, here at Gurobi, we want to democratize optimization and make it more approachable. Any successful optimization practitioner requires significant math and coding skills and domain-specific knowledge. Thousands of people are daunted, just like I was, every year by this behemoth called “optimization”-not only because of its vastness and underdog status but also because its entry barrier is undoubtedly high. After all, it’s like a universal language with a particular set of syntax rules What helped me in this ordeal was finding intuitive ways to explain highly technical concepts or associate those ideas with everyday life experiences.įor example, I had a hard time learning the art of modeling real-world problems until I realized something: modeling is simply translating a problem description from natural language to math. Of course, this story has a happy ending-otherwise, I wouldn’t be sharing this experience with you.

As you can imagine, being a mere bachelor’s student in Industrial Engineering, I sure had a bumpy start.

Little did I know to what extent the optimization field involves math and programming. “Optimization sounds like something useful,” I remember thinking as I enrolled in an introductory course. Below, Juan Orozco Guzman, the game creator, shares the origins of this game. With the aim of making optimization coding more approachable, this game asks learners to learn to code by first stepping away from the computer to match the pieces of a math model to optimization code. In 2022, Gurobi introduced the Gurobipy Card Game.

Python creating a card memory game