• Covered Bridge 54

    The Traveling Salesperson Problem

    The Traveling Salesperson Problem, aka TSP, is a classic problem in Computer Science. In it, the traveler wants to visit all the cities on their route and travel the least amount of distance. To quote Wikipedia, It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, important in theoretical computer science and operations research. The important part to note here is “NP-hard,” which means “If P ≠ NP, then NP-hard problems cannot be solved in polynomial time.“ And Britanica says “This is an example of an NP-complete problem (from nonpolynomial), for which no known efficient (i.e., polynomial time) algorithm exists.“ NP-hard and NP-Complete are classes of Computer Science problems that have been…