Exploring the Traveling Salesman Problem (With Punch Cards)
Seeing the traveling salesman problem mentioned in this article triggered a fond memory. Long ago, when woolly mammoths still walked the hills of New Jersey and I was an EE student, there was no separate ORFE or even CS department. It was all part of EE. Ken Steiglitz taught an algorithms course, and assigned a simplified version in which the goal was to search for a path which minimized total distance traveled. Recall that personal computers hadn’t happened yet, so you had to program on punch cards for the shiny new IBM 360/91 (in the middle of the night, when you had a prayer of getting access). I framed my work in terms of Frodo, a traveling ring salesman who had to visit all the cities of Middle Earth. If I recall correctly, Professor Steiglitz liked that enough to use the same framing for it in his 1982 book, and gave me an acknowledgment.
Seeing the traveling salesman problem mentioned in this article triggered a fond memory. Long ago, when woolly mammoths still walked the hills of New Jersey and I was an EE student, there was no separate ORFE or even CS department. It was all part of EE. Ken Steiglitz taught an algorithms course, and assigned a simplified version in which the goal was to search for a path which minimized total distance traveled. Recall that personal computers hadn’t happened yet, so you had to program on punch cards for the shiny new IBM 360/91 (in the middle of the night, when you had a prayer of getting access). I framed my work in terms of Frodo, a traveling ring salesman who had to visit all the cities of Middle Earth. If I recall correctly, Professor Steiglitz liked that enough to use the same framing for it in his 1982 book, and gave me an acknowledgment.