MENTAL MODEL · M4059

Traveling Salesman Problem - TSP

TechnicalHigh supportAlgorithms

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Version 1.0.0 · Updated 2026-07-30

CORE DEFINITION

Given a set of cities and the distances between them, find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the starting city. As the number of cities increases, the computational complexity of finding the route grows exponentially (NP-hard), making it impossible to find the optimal solution through exhaustive search.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

The wisdom of suboptimal solutions. When facing complex logistics, scheduling, or life planning, do not attempt to find the "absolute optimal solution" (which would consume a lifetime to compute). Accept the "good enough" suboptimal solution found by "heuristic algorithms"; action is better than perfect planning.

anchor

Anchor fast decisions

Finding the shortest route that visits n cities exactly once and returns to the origin is a classic NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem; as the number of cities increases slightly, the solution space explodes factorially.

MINIMUM ACTION

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Practice this model in one real situation:

Model as a minimum-cost tour on a complete graph
for small instances use exact methods (e.g., branch and bound), for large instances use approximation/heuristic methods (e.g., greedy, genetic algorithms, simulated annealing).

Check to track your progress (stored locally)

Learning progress0%

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Source support: Explicit

link
zh.wikipedia.orghttps://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%85%E8%A1%8C%E6%8E%A8%E9%94%80%E5%91%98%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98ZH · Explicit
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