Nice work! Just out of interest, have you compared R14 and R13 using branch and bound vs. normal for accuracy?
A 'pure' branch and bound that isn't doing any heuristics or estimation to determine bounds should still search the entire space, so will find the same solution (but hopefully faster!). In a problem space like this it should be able to discard a large number of search directions because they will be... 'crap' basically
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