This is very cool. Any notion of how the performance compares to real TSP solvers? Presumably they pull all sorts of dirty tricks to be as fast as possible.
It also strikes me that this is going to be great for comparing the performance of various solvers without having to rewrite all the code every time since you can use the same code across all backends.
Not sure exactly, but I guess the dirty tricks are what really makes the difference. If you want to optimally solve a TSP, and know you are optimal when you stop, this is the approach you would use in practice - as far as I know it is the only thing that scales well. Its the underlying principle behind Concorde (http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/concorde.html) which AFAIK is the best TSP solver out there.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 13.0 ms ] threadIt also strikes me that this is going to be great for comparing the performance of various solvers without having to rewrite all the code every time since you can use the same code across all backends.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaheuristic