Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Let Nature Solves NP-Complete Problem

Posted by timothy on from the unconventional-approaches dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Why not? Here's a start: Tourist Map Illuminates shortest route Light up a gas-tube graph with electricity to find the shortest path between two points. Can they extend this to multiple vertices to instantly solve the NP-Complete traveling salesman problem?"

2 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. I prefer the slime mould version... by SIGFPE · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...here

    --
    -- SIGFPE
  2. Shortest-path problems are easy ... by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... for computers too. Any decent book on algorithms will give you several elegant, easy-to-implement, blazingly fast methods. The TSP, like all NP problems, is much different. Thinking about the gas-tube device (which is a really cool idea, I must say) there's no way to apply it to the TSP. Electricity just doesn't work that way.

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.