Definition: traveling salesman problem

A classic mathematical problem that finds the shortest distance of round trip travel between multiple locations. The traveling salesman problem (TSP) generates directions from city 1 to city 2 and so on.

It Takes Longer Than You Think
To brute force a solution with a 100-city round- trip (try this route, then this), it can take a single computer years. Instead, algorithms are used to compute the answer, which may offer a best case with no guarantee of the most economical route.

Mathematicians have worked on the TSP for decades because it has real-life analogies. Although a 100-city trip seems unlikely, there are routing problems with hundreds of components. For example, printed circuit boards have holes all over and not just in neat rows and columns. To determine the shortest distance a machine has to move to drill all the holes in the board saves the manufacturer time.