After Karp’s paper was published, many computer scientists set their sights on creating an efficient algorithm to find approximate solutions to the traveling salesman problem — round-trip ...

And even the most unrelenting brute-force attack on the traveling salesman problem (TSP) might not be enough. Finding the shortest way around a 33-city route would require calculating the distances ...

The salesman can calculate the distance of all six possible routes and choose the shortest. This is the “brute-force” solution of the TSP. But what if there are 10 cities instead of three?