Oh, Wadhwa again. He promotes himself as an expert on a huge range of subjects. His real business was automatically upgrading COBOL programs for Y2K fixes; he did a startup for that.[1] Now he's a pundit. He has vague affiliations with various academic institutions, but he's not a real academic.

The traveling salesman problem isn't hard. It's one of those things that's NP-hard only for pathological cases, as is linear programming. Solutions to the TSP which produce a near-optimum result, and the optimal result most of the time, are easy. (Connect nodes arbitrarily. Then randomly cut two links to split path into three sections, try all ways to reconnect the three sections, pick the best. Repeat until no improvement for a while. Bell Labs, 1960s.)

Now, if quantum computing could help with factoring, we'd have a problem.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=tTkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA40&lpg=P...