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 ...

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 ...

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 ...