Today’s blog entry was written by Luke Brownlee and Connor Lockett!
Welcome back to the fifth day of the 2026 Math and the Mouse cohort’s adventure to uncover the mystical secrets behind mathematical decision making!
On perhaps our most anticipated (and earliest) day yet, the group departed for the Magic Kingdom to obtain some data on the Tron Lightcycle/Run and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad attractions! Filled with excitement and a slight desire for a little extra sleep, we made our way towards the Magic Kingdom on the monorail where a handful of group members elected to play a round of Monorail Surfing to galvanize our spirits before meeting the CEO of Touring Plans: Len Testa. Len personally escorted us to Tron to secure the best possible placement in the regular entry crowd to measure the actual wait time for the ride and the amount of people who exited the ride before our first rider showed up; our three terrific professors made sure the other members of our Tron and Big Thunder Mountain crews were in position for the data collection to start as well (all the data we collected today is going to be used by Touring Plans to contribute to their own decision making for their customers. The Big Thunder Mountain group successfully finished collecting their data first followed by the Tron crew after a relatively brief delay in line movement.
Once we all regrouped, we noticed that the line for Tron was considerably shorter than normal, so it was a given that the entire group rode on Tron since many group members still had not been on the ride, especially after a focused session of data collection. We all received a serendipitous surprise from Dr. Harris who used his sweet talking skills and overall congenial personality to snag our entire group lightning lanes to Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (the reworked and revamped Splash Mountain), another ride multiple group members had not yet experienced. The overall atmosphere of the ride was quite homey and invited our group to relive the story of “The Princess and the Frog” via a relaxing ride through the vivacious Louisiana bayou. As the original name of the attraction suggests, we ALL got soaked, albeit at varying levels. Of course, this did not dampen our morale, and we left the park content knowing that we had already had a day full of both work and play! On our way back to the hotel for lunch, we relaunched onto the water after discovering the monorails were temporarily down which gave the group an opportunity to “surf” back to the hotel after
all.
Once we got back to the hotel we all still had considerable work ahead of us but that would wait until our lunch break was over at 2pm. The Mickey Bar Stand projects were our first order of business and would be worked on until 5:15. Though the groups had finished working with their data to find the optimal places to locate their Mickey Bar Stands for all three parts, they needed to work on their presentations. The presentations themselves did not have any strict guidelines, which gave us lots of freedom on how to present the information.
During our class today we learned some basics to Graph theory and what Complete Graphs are. These are graphs in which all the vertices or corners are all connected to one another by edges. This is also the basis for the Traveling Salesman Problem. This problem is one in which a salesman is trying to go to all the towns (vertices) in the most optimal way. The roads (edges) which connect all towns all have different lengths of time, which makes this problem complex. This problem is also known to be NP-hard, meaning the only way to know the solution would be to check all possible solutions, and the number of solutions grows factorially! Even with just 20 vertices it could take millions of years to check all the solutions, so how would you figure out the best solution? This is where heuristic solutions come into need, as they find a good but not optimal solution, allowing us to find solutions in a quick time frame.
Next, we were explained the Traveling Tourist Problem, which makes the times between locations change as the time changes, making the problem even harder. Then we were broken up into four groups so that we could solve this problem for Disney rides. The four groups plus the professors would need to create their own itinerary based on the average queue time of rides, how far away they are, and how long the rides were, and then compete to see who made the best itinerary. Though at the park we will be allowed to change our plan in case of better opportunities or disastrous events that might occur. For this we will be going to 12 rides in Magic Kingdom, including Big Thunder Mountain, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, and It’s a Small World, all without lightning lanes. After looking at the data, the teachers and students got worried that the time to ride all these rides would take longer than the original ending time of 4pm, so after we gaggled and discussed for some time, we decided to extend the time in the park to 5pm.
While the groups were working on their itineraries the professors bought them food from a nearby Greek restaurant named PITA Mediterranean Street Food. The food there was delicious and this also gave us more time to work on our new projects. After the groups decided on their plans, many of us decided to head to Target to make sure we had portable lunches and snacks to not waste any time in Magic Kingdom tomorrow. After that everyone was exhausted and decided to go to bed early for another long and fun day tomorrow!
Thanks for reading today's blog!
-Connor and Luke
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