Original story reprinted with permission from Simons Science News, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the computational, physical and life sciences.*The traveling salesman problem asks: Given a collection of cities connected by highways, what is the shortest route that visits every city and returns to the starting place? The answer has practical applications to processes such as drilling holes in circuit boards, scheduling tasks on a computer and ordering features of a genome. The traveling salesman problem is easy to state, and — in theory at least — it can be easily solved by checking every round-trip route to find the shortest one.
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