So back in my previous post I discussed the problem of the Traveling Santa. He wants to deliver gifts as quickly as possible to seven different towns. At its essence, this is a Traveling Salesman Problem, a well known and very difficult problem in graph theory and combinatorial optimization. I decided to take my own crack at the problem and see if I could devise a solution.
I wrote a program to tell me the shortest Hamiltonian cycle through the 7 towns. I used the networkx library to set up my graphs and then generated a list of all the Hamiltonian cycles. Then using the weights provided by each edge I calculated the total distance for each of the paths. After that, I was able to narrow it down to the shortest ones.
One solution that my program found was the cycle that visits [7, 4, 2, 1, 5, 6, 3, 7] with a distance of 39. You can check out the code here, and I’d be interested to hear about your ideas or alternative implementations.