Traveling Salesman Problem Art or TSP art is art that is made by taking an image and turning it into a TSP problem. The Traveling Salesman Problem is simple: given a list of locations you need to visit, what is the shortest path you can take that visits every location? For example, you may need to visit the grocery store, a friend’s house, school, and then return home, and you want to know in which order you should go to minimize the time it will take. This problem isn’t too hard to solve for a few locations, but it becomes exponentially harder the more locations we add, so the problem becomes very hard to solve for more than a few locations (for just 10 locations there are more than 3.6 million possible combinations!).
TSP art is made by taking an image and turning it into a TSP problem. By finding a very short route (although not necessarily the shortest since that may take more time than is in the universe to figure out), an elegant, beautiful image is naturally constructed.
Each of the images above is a solution to the TSP problem with a little over 6,000 locations.
Fun fact! The number of possible routes for the images above is about as big as the number of particles in the observable universe, multiplied by itself 80 times!
Your Fractal 