Dear all,

 

The PTSP (Physical Travelling Salesman Problem) offers an interesting

twist on the standard TSP: the aim now is to find the optimal sequence

of force vectors able to accelerate a point mass to visit all cities in the

minimum number of steps.

 

The deadline for the CEC 2011 competition is one week away:

 

  http://algoval.essex.ac.uk/ptsp/ptsp.html

 

The aim is to write a solver for this, and then to upload the best solutions

you can find for the 5 competition maps.  For experts in heuristics and meta-heuristics

this could be an interesting challenge.

 

The problem is easy to get started with, but seems hard to solve well.

 

This competition was previously run for GECCO 2005 – results are here:

 

  http://csee.essex.ac.uk/staff/sml/gecco/ptsp/Results.html

 

 

Best wishes,

 

   Simon Lucas

 

http://csee.essex.ac.uk/staff/lucas/