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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. Great... by hackwrench · · Score: 0, Troll

    If you like walking over buildings!

  2. Not all that impressive. by Tom+Rothamel · · Score: 1, Troll

    This doesn't strike me as all that impressive. They need to customize hardware for any city they wish to model. One can consider this to be a form of preprocessing, and for a fair comparison to be made, one must also allow preprocessing to be done using the computational method. After preprocessing, results can be obtained using an array lookup.

    This may be interesting, but I doubt it's all that revolutionary.