Does anyone know a better alternative to MS Excel's Solver?
My company has to crunch a lot of data and part of the process involves running the solver and plotting a graph through resulting data points. Obviously there is a lot of copy and paste involved and the whole process is shaky, error prone and all round cluster-fudge. I was wondering if there was an alternative to the solver that can be used so that even if we have to use excel to plot the final graph, there will be a lot less data that needs to be copied and pasted back and forth. It would be great especially if the tool could be easily integrated into a .NET application but I am open to suggestions that may require a little bit of code-fu to get this to work.
Thanks!
Answer
The solver is essentially an iterative technique used to find roots of functions. Depending on the particular form of the function that you are trying to find a root of, you can roll your own or use existing implementations of the bisection method or Newton's method (or many other iterative root-finding techniques). If you post more about the specific problem that you are trying to solve, I might be able to point you to a more specific technique. Alternatively, you can read about root-finding and look at the Extreme Optimization library.