Planning a Trip

Last class, you should have found a group of about 4 people, and chosen a city for a 2-day trip. Next, you should have found at least 6 different places you'd like to visit.

Lastly, you were to think about the order and times you'd want to do each thing across the two days.

TODAY

Our goal is to figure out the best order to visit things. We need one more location, a hotel, and we need to figure out how far away things are to try to plan out the best route.

The goal to figure out the best route is an important and very well known issue in Computer Science; We call this the Traveling Salesman problem. Let's briefly learn about it.

Before we go back to our main task, I'd like you to try playing with a few online Traveling Salesman applets. I'll show you a few here:

Wolfram Alpha Traveling Salesman Applet:
https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/demonstrations/TravelingSalesmanGame-source.nb

Lancaste University Traveling Salesman Applet:
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fas/psych/software/TSP/TSP.html

Ok, now let's try to finish up our travel planning.