Abstract: The traveling salesman problem is a simple problem: given a 2D graph of cities, what is the shortest circuit - the shortest route that visits each city exactly once? The triviality of this task is deceptive: it is, in fact, NP-complete: while many algorithms can produce a very good route, no known method exists of finding the shortest route without some measure of brute-force trial-and-error computation.

This application is an attempt to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem with a Hopfield-Tank neural network, which is the classic solution. As this application demonstrates, however, the algorithm spectacularly fails to produce perfect, or even good, solutions. Competing algorithms produce much better solutions in much shorter time frames.

Version: 1.0 - last updated Thursday, June 09, 2005

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