Recently there have been a few talks at PyCons about using integer linear programming for scheduling conferences. Some of these have ended in disappointment because the theoretical guarantees did not translate in to practical possibilities.

In this talk I will explain why you are wherever you are at the time of the talk (even if you're not in this talk): PyCon UK has been scheduled using this approach.

I'll go over some of the mathematical background to linear programming and also discuss other solution approaches to these types of problems.