This past summer The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction published my novelette “The Traveling Salesman Solution–which has generally been lauded for getting some hard math right[*] in the service of posing a totally non-mathematical ethical dilemma.
If you’re the sort of reader who dug that story–or would dig such a story–for the math, then you are gonna *love* this: A guy named Todd W. Schneider has put together a neat littler interactive web-app for solving instances of the Traveling Salesman Problem using simulated annealing.
The Traveling Salesman with Simulated Annealing, R, and Shiny – Todd W. Schneider
For folks who’ve read the story, you may wonder: Is this Todd guy gonna build a doomsday device now (’cause, naturally, that’s what you do with computer hardware/software that solves the TSP). The answer is, “No,” because his program doesn’t *solve* the TSP, per se. The neat thing about simulated annealing is that it’s a short cut for finding *good* solutions, not *optimum*, solutions. You save time by settling for something less than perfect (which, itself, is sort of a tidy lesson in trade-offs, ethical and otherwise). Very neat, but not the world-shaking all-purpose always-optimal TSP-solver that poor old Bryce built in the story.
For more abut the story, you can check out this interview. Sadly, it’s not available as an ebook yet (I’ve been busy), but you can order the print back issue directly from F&SF, or contact me directly and I’ll see if I can hook you up with a PDF or something.
(I got wind of Todd W. Schneider’s simulated annealing TSP web app via The Atlantic’s City Lab)
[*] IRONY ALERT: As one very astute reviewer pointed out I got the hard math right, and then screwed up the simple act of transcribing it–which basically sums up why I repeated algebra and barely passed pre-calc. *sighs*