The combinatorics of airfare search are daunting.  There are 25,000,000 practical flight combinations for a round-trip between Boston and Los Angeles with one-day travel windows.  Computing the price for any one of those ways is at least NP-hard.  Fares are updated five times a day, while seat availability data is updated in real-time at 100Hz.  And we must produce a diverse array of the most convenient and inexpensive solutions in ten seconds or less....

ITA Software takes care to choose the correct tools for each problem. We attack these problems with algorithms spanning the fields of graph theory, parsing, machine learning, databases, optimization, and distributed systems.  We code in whatever language is best suited to the task, be it Lisp, C++, Java, Python, Perl or XSLT.