Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record | Quanta Magazine

Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record | Quanta Magazine

Good news for travelling salespeople

Computer scientists have taken the iconic travelling salesperson problem down a peg. The quandary asks you to optimize the shortest round trip through a set of cities, with applications for everything from planning bus routes to DNA sequencing. A new method for finding approximate solutions to the problem beats the long-standing front-runner only by an almost unthinkably tiny amount. Nevertheless, it breaks through a theoretical and psychological logjam that researchers hope will “open the floodgates to further improvements”, reports Quanta.

Quanta | 5 min read