by [Theo Verelst]

In short, the traveling salesman problem is a good mathematical and practical example in network or graph optimization, where one imagines a salesman, maybe with a car or a horse which needs to visit a set of customers, and wants to take the shortest route.

We could take a map, draw circles around every destination city, draw lines between all reasonable adjacent or all next cities, and look up or measure the distance between pairs of cities, and write them in kilometers along all connecting lines.

Then we give the thus constructed graph to computer wizard, and tell him or her to ''solve'' the problem.