Assume that a salesperson wants to visit 30 cities while minimizing the

total number of miles she must travel. She decides to design an algorithm to find

the optimal order in which cities must be visited to

• Minimize the number of kilometers traveled and

• Visit each city only once.

Assume that the computer has access to all the intercity distances, and that it can

calculate the total distance for an all-city route at the rate of 10,000,000 a second.

AHow long will it take to calculate the cost of all such routes and give the

best one? Give your answer in large units like weeks, months or years. I’ll

post some hints on this one and/or mention it in class.

BIf it does not seem like a feasible solution, suggest an alternative way of

coming up with a reasonable algorithm to find a good (not necessarily

optimal) route

Show your calculations!