Travelling salesman variation in python

[Nick Craig-Wood]

Peter Maas <peter.maas at mplusr.de> wrote:
>  Nick Craig-Wood wrote:
> > I used Simulated Annealing - have a search for the term and you'll see
> > plenty of references.  Its good at finding a (local) minimum.
> 
>  I used to think that Simulated Annealing avoids local traps and
>  is good at finding a global minimum, at least with a certain
>  probability that depends on some temperature function. Am I wrong?

You aren't wrong...  It does avoid local traps - that is what the
simulated annealing bit is for - but it isn't guaranteed to find the
global minimum otherwise you'd have solved an NP-complete problem in
polynomial time...

In practice it works extrememly well!

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood
ncw at axis.demon.co.uk