Great Minds Have Worked Out How Long A Pub Crawl Of The UK Would Take

These days scientists are out there putting in work to discover things like artificial eggs that can create living animals, or finding water vapour plumes on Mars that could mean the existence of life on the Red Planet. But are they putting time aside to put work into truly important things? Barely.

However, a group of our scientifically inclined chums have worked out how long a pub crawl across the entire UK would take. These people are spending their time wisely.

The shortest route would take 28,270 miles, with almost 25,000 stops, which, even to the worst mathematicians, equals enough lager to tranquilise a horse, a family of elephants, Ric Flair, The Gallaghers, Shane MacGowan, the entire WWF Attitude Era roster, and still have a little left over to cure your hangover the next day.

Credit: PA

A team led by maths professor William Cook, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, worked out the route, claiming it to be the 'longest single road route ever worked out'. They said that, using the 24,727 pubs on the Pubs Galore website, they used Google Maps to find the distance between them.

The method the professor and his team used to worked out the distance is called The Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), which is typically used to work out the shortest possible way to get from A to B.

Professor William Cook went on to say some jargon which isn't really understandable to those of us who got a C in GCSE science: "We, of course, did not have in mind to bring everything mathematics has to bear in order to improve the lot of a wandering pub aficionado.

"Rather, we use the U.K. pubs problem as a means for developing and testing general-purpose optimisation methods, which have wide applications in science, industry and commerce."

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In full, the route is a circle, so theoretically you could leave your house for a pint and be back within a year and a half.

The journey, which would give The Fellowship of the Ring a run for its money, would see you entering a pub on average once an hour, though there is one patch which would see you walk for 50 hours and 270 miles to quench your thirst from Durness to a pub in the Shetlands. And that, would be commitment.

Featured image credit: PA

Mark McGowan

Mark is a journalist at LADbible, who joined in 2015 after a year as a freelance writer. In the past he blogged for independent football fan channel Redmen TV, after graduating from Staffordshire University with degrees in journalism and English literature. He has worked on campaigns such as UOKM8? and IIOC.