How long would it take to....

[Googol]

Travel into and through every one of the 400 billion start systems in a Sidewinder at maximum supercruise speed assuming I took the shortest possible distance?

With 400,000,000,000 systems and you want to calculate the fastest journey, it would take longer to calculate the trip than to fly it

True. This is the Travelling salesman problem and the wiki suggests that calculating the route alone would take an amount of time based, at minimum, on 2 to the power of the number of destinations. An exact solution for 85,900 destinations took 136 CPU-years to calculate in 2006, so a 2^400000000000 based number would probably take a bit longer .

 

[JughedJones]

True. This is the Travelling salesman problem and the wiki suggests that calculating the route alone would take an amount of time based, at minimum, on 2 to the power of the number of destinations. An exact solution for 85,900 destinations took 136 CPU-years to calculate in 2006, so a 2^400000000000 based number would probably take a bit longer .

Man, I really dislike math... but this is fun!

 

[Thygrrr]

With 400,000,000,000 systems and you want to calculate the fastest journey, it would take longer to calculate the trip than to fly it

That has to be the MOTHER of all Traveling Salesman Problems.

 

[usernametaken]

No, I think the mother of all travelling salesmen problems goes to Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. An immortal who, after getting a little fed up, set out to insult everyone in the Universe. In alphabetical order.

Admittedly that's not a true travelling salesman problem (shortest route), but it would be a nightmare to work out and perform.