> To provide some context: If you started computing this problem on your home computer right now, you’d find the optimal route in about 9.64 x 1052 years — long after the Sun has entered its red giant phase and devoured the Earth
The above statement is only correct if you go for the naivest of brute force enumerations. As an alternative, you could use a mathematical programming code like Concorde [1], and solve the problem to optimality in under a second.
> If we’re willing to accept that we don’t need the absolute best route between all of the landmarks, then we can turn to smarter techniques such as genetic algorithms to find a solution that’s good enough for our purposes.
The particular TSP instance tackled heuristically in this post (i.e. without any optimality guarantees) is about the same size (50 cities) as that solved by Dantzig, Fulkerson and Johnson to optimality, by hand, in 1954 [2].