Traveling Salesman Art

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In a picture, random points are selected proportionally to the gray levels of the picture. An algorithm for the "traveling salesman problem"—which asks for the shortest path through a set of cities without passing through any of them twice—is then used to draw a precomputed continuous line with no overlaps through the set of points. This Demonstration lets you see how the tour progresses.

Contributed by: Enrique Zeleny (June 2012)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


Snapshots


Details

The built-in Mathematica command used to calculate the path is , with the Method option set to "RemoveCrossings".

The man in the picture is Alan Turing, founder of computer science, born in 1912.

Reference

[1] C. S. Kaplan and R. Bosch. "TSP Art." (May 19, 2005) www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/papers/kaplan_bridges2005b.pdf.



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