← All demos the budget solve · bb_core.js
The budget frontier
Expected maximum as a function of the path-time budget, adaptive against both baselines.
Every point is a full solve: dual bisection on the shadow price, wavefront policies from the obstacle problem, Frank–Wolfe mixing. The one-shot baseline keeps everyone until its best single screening date and then retains an upper tail; static thinning spends the same budget on a random subset chosen at time zero. Change the intensity and the sweep reruns.
What to look for: no baseline may exceed the adaptive
curve by more than that point's certified suboptimality, and one-shot must
never fall below static thinning; a larger crossing would falsify the
solver, since both baselines are feasible policies for the same problem.
The true ordering is adaptive ≥ one-shot ≥ static, with ties at both
ends: at tight budgets the best screening date is time zero, when every
path still sits at the same starting point, and at slack budgets the whole
cloud is funded, so all three policies keep everyone. The adaptive curve
should also be concave — each extra unit of budget buys less than
the one before.
Discretization: 40 time steps on a 241-point state grid, chosen so the ten-point sweep completes in about a second. Finer grids shift the curves by a few hundredths without changing their order.