Gotta respect the planning that went into choosing a problem that's both absurd and actually solvable

In the "computations" page[1], the table lists the Netherlands computation as costing 97 CPU years with 6 months of elapsed time, while the Korean bars costs 44 years of CPU time and 3 months of elapsed time. I can't tell if the two problems were solved using the same hardware.

[1] https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/korea/computation.html

Do we know they didn’t just prune problematic bars from the dataset until they found a one with a solution?

You and I don’t know. But this is hacker news so there is probably somebody here keeping them honest.