A generating function approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem

  • Authors:
  • Samuel Kohn;Allan Gottlieb;Meryle Kohn

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ACM '77 Proceedings of the 1977 annual conference
  • Year:
  • 1977

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Abstract

A new deterministic approach to the (assymetric) Traveling Salesman Problem based on generating functions is introduced. Specifically, we produce a function G(x)&equil;&Sgr;&agr;ix ei where each ei is the cost of a possible tour and &agr;i is the number of tours having this cost. Evaluating G(x) at a specific value close to O and using a logarithmic technique, we extract the smallest exponent, i.e., the minimal tour cost. For an n city problem the method requires on the order of n32n steps and storage for n2 values (possibly of high precision). This technique should be applicable to other “NP” problems.