From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2007-10-07T02:07:48+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] Itinerary for a Traveling Salesman (#142)

On Oct 6, 2007, at 10:55 AM, Simon Kröger wrote:

>
>> A salesman wants to call on his customers, each of which is  
>> located in a
>> different city.  He asks you to prepare an itinerary for him that  
>> will minimize
>> his driving miles.  The itinerary must take him to each city  
>> exactly once and
>> return him to his starting point. Can you write a Ruby program to  
>> generate such
>> an itinerary?
>> [...]
>
> Sorry if i'm just stating the obvious - this quiz isn't about  
> finding a
> solution (fast and correct) but to implement the genetic algorithm,  
> right?
>
> I'm just asking myself if i missed a (or maybe the) point...

The goal of this quiz was to come up with a good problem to  
experiment with genetic algorithms on, yes.  Morton and I discussed  
that quite a bit.

However, as you all know by now, I'm not a big restrictions kind of  
guy.  So I suggested Morton lay out the problem and describe the way  
we think would be fun to solve it.

That leaves the choice of strategy to the solver and we won't take  
away your keyboard if you don't use a genetic algorithm.  ;)

James Edward Gray II

P.S.  Of course, if you've been waiting to play with genetic  
algorithms, this is your chance!  I was itching for a good excuse to  
try one, so that's how I built my solution.  This is a good problem  
for the experiment, I think.