You can get a temporary free license for Gurobi. You are limited to a 1000 node problem size, but you can learn how to use the tool and set up your problem.
If you have a problem that needs Gurobi, it’s worth paying for it. Talk with their sales team. They are happy to help you get started. They know once you know how to use it, and how it can solve problems you will be inclined to use it in the future.
This is not true: to get an academic license of Gurobi, you have to be a member of a degree-granting academic institution (otherwise every person could easily (illegally) get one):
> https://www.gurobi.com/academia/academic-program-and-license...
"You must be a faculty member, student, or staff of a recognized degree-granting academic institution.
[...]
To activate your license, you must connect from a recognized academic network."
Plus, the setup is really fucking annoying... The number of times I had to reactivate my academic license of gurobi while in uni...
The speed is totally worth it though, literally orders of magnitude better than any alternative for wide problem classes. Plus the bindings are good enough that you rarely ever need to drop into c++
If you can't even get a random member of any degree-granting institution (could just be random research staff, a student or adjunct faculty) to take some interest in your optimization problem as a subject for publishable research, does it even qualify as a "nerdy" problem?
> If you have a problem that needs Gurobi, it’s worth paying for it.
Thit statement is baed on the assumption that it is a "big money" problem. On the other hand, I know lots of problems interesting to nerds for which Gurobi would help (but nerds don't have the money).