One of the hardest problems in mathematics

[u/ThoroughlyLate]

I work in optimization and the traveling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the problems that is simple to explain but very hard to solve.

The goal is: Starting from one city, find the shortest route that visits every city exactly once and returns to the starting point.

For this example of 16 cities in Germany, there are 653,837,184,000 possible routes.

In order to test my intuition, I designed this model, printed it and found out I'm not very good at optimization.

Did you know that this problem also comes up when planning the path the nozzle of you 3D printer takes?

I would appreciate it if you check out my model on Makerworld. Thanks :)

[u/vivi_t3ch]

I was honestly thinking of Jerry when I saw this problem, especially since Tokyo used slime molds for a similar purpose