Solving the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) with Python
Johm Montgomery (ShowMeDo author) has started a very nice blog series on Solving the classic Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) with Python.
So far there are 3 posts in the series:
- Tackling the travelling salesman problem: prologue - gives some background on John’s plans
- Tackling the travelling salesman problem: introduction - defines the TSP and ‘NP-Hard’-ness, discusses how to represent the problem in Python and looks at some of the evolutionary-programming tools that will be used in the solution
- Tackling the travelling salesman problem: hill-climbing - John introduces the concept of a ‘fitness landscape’, how a hill-climbing algorithm can traverse the landscape and how to write the hill-climber with Python
John is using a combination of Python code, explanation and graphics to show everything you need for this fascinating topic. Don’t forget to leave John a comment on his blog to let him know what you think.
To learn more about Python you can visit ShowMeDo’s list of Python videos which contains 94 Python tutorials including almost 2-hours worth of tuition in the Python Newbies on XP series.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:48 am
Thanks for letting some more people know about this series.
Just added another post where I use Python’s profile module to see if there are any obvious performance problems.
The next post should be back into combinatorial optimisation and I’ll be talking about simulated annealing.