The traveling salesman problem is one of the basic problems that many theoretical computer scientists have been working on. Many scientists think that there is no algorithm for the traveling salesman ...

When Nathan Klein started graduate school two years ago, his advisers proposed a modest plan: to work together on one of the most famous, long-standing problems in theoretical computer science. Even ...

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 ...

Imagine a salesman who has a list of towns he needs to visit. He would like to find the shortest route by which he can visit each town exactly once and end up in the town he started with. This is the ...