The Traveling Salesman Problem, also known as TSP, is one of the most well-known logical problems in Computer Science.
The premise is simple – imagine that you are a salesman that have meetings in a number of different cities across the globe. The question is then – in what order should you visit these cities to minimize travel?
It sounds like an easy problem, but it is in fact not. The number of permutations – or possible combinations – is huge, and it grows exponentially with the number of cities.
Computer scientists have come up with many creative solutions throughout the years. However, more recenty Diego Vicente published a solution using numpy and Python which has gone viral.
It is using a method called Self-Organizing Map (SOM). You can read more about this method and find the source code following this link.
In Tribby3d we use a form of shortest-path algorithm in the software. Can you guess which one, and how we are using it?
Read more about Tribby3d here: https://tribby3d.com