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 ...

If the computation of each path were to take one microsecond in the travelling salesman problem, then trying to solve the problem using brute force becomes practically impossible beyond perhaps 12 ...

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 ...

Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research shows how to implement simulated annealing for the Traveling Salesman Problem (find the best ordering of a set of discrete items).

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?