Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research shows how to implement simulated annealing for the Traveling Salesman Problem (find the best ordering of a set of discrete items). The goal of a combinatorial ...

Computers are good at answering questions. What’s the shortest route from my house to Area 51? Is 8,675,309 a prime number? How many teaspoons in a tablespoon? For questions like these, they’ve got ...

A new approach to solving the ‘Travelling Salesperson Problem’ – one of the most difficult questions in computer science – significantly outperforms current approaches. A notorious theoretical ...

Bumblebees can find the solution to a complex mathematical problem which keeps computers busy for days. Scientists in the UK have discovered that bees learn to fly the shortest possible route between ...