Today I have literally been working on the Travelling Salesman Problem which is a logic problem that asks what the shortest path a travelling salesman can use to go to visit a number of cities. This is one of those problems that has significant ramifications for the real world – it is a generic version of finding the quickest road between two points; or working out which is the best way to fly around a country based on what cheap tickets are available.

I still have some work to do on improving the program… And to be honest some of the hassle is working out what exactly what I want it to do. Although working on it is fun, I am glad this is not my day job… I think I would go crazy with some of the math involved. In fact I opened my text book which included this problem from uni today, and I could not understand what the textbook actually said. Most of the words made sense, but certainly most of the symbols did not.