If you have been in sales a while – and certainly if you have spent a lot of that time driving around a territory – you probably know about the traveling salesman problem. Put simply, it asks this: given a collection of locations to visit, what is the shortest route that visits every location and returns to the starting place?
This article from Wired provides a fascinating look at this old problem.
The article also points out that the answer has “practical applications to processes such as drilling holes in circuit boards, scheduling tasks on a computer and ordering features of a genome.”
Of course, sometime you need to stop by that special lunch spot or be at a specific location at a specific time (throwing the algorithm into a tizzy), but an interesting theoretical viewpoint nonetheless.