资料来源 : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

travelling salesman problem
     
         (TSP or "shortest path", US:
        "traveling") Given a set of towns and the distances between
        them, determine the shortest path starting from a given town,
        passing through all the other towns and returning to the first
        town.
     
        This is a famous problem with a variety of solutions of
        varying complexity and efficiency.  The simplest solution (the
        {brute force} approach) generates all possible routes and
        takes the shortest.  This becomes impractical as the number of
        towns, N, increases since the number of possible routes is
        !(N-1).  A more intelligent {algorithm} (similar to {iterative
        deepening}) considers the shortest path to each town which can
        be reached in one hop, then two hops, and so on until all
        towns have been visited.  At each stage the algorithm
        maintains a "frontier" of reachable towns along with the
        shortest route to each.  It then expands this frontier by one
        hop each time.
     
        {Pablo Moscato's TSP bibliography
        (http://www.densis.fee.unicamp.br/~moscato/TSPBIB_home.html)}.
        {Fractals and the TSP
        (http://www.ing.unlp.edu.ar/cetad/mos/FRACTAL_TSP_home.html)}.
     
        (1998-03-24)