The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classic puzzle in optimization that’s as fascinating as it is challenging. Imagine you’re planning a road trip where you need to visit a bunch of cities, but you want to do it in the shortest possible way without repeating any stops, and then head back home. That’s basically what TSP is all about. It sounds simple at first, but as you add more cities, the number of possible routes skyrockets, making it a real headache to solve perfectly. This problem isn’t just a brain teaser—it’s got real-world applications too, from planning delivery routes for logistics companies to solving complex issues in computer science and even DNA sequencing. Researchers love TSP because it pushes the limits of algorithms and computational power, inspiring both brute force methods and clever shortcuts to find a good enough solution when an exact answer is just too hard to compute.
So, here is a visualization of the Traveling Salesman Problem written in Javascript: