Related papers: An Improved Upper Bound for the Euclidean TSP Cons…
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) famously asks for a shortest tour that a salesperson can take to visit a given set of cities in any order. In this paper, we ask how much faster $k \ge 2$ salespeople can visit the cities if they divide…
The Traveling Salesman Problem is one of the best studied NP-hard problems in combinatorial optimization. Powerful methods have been developed over the last 60 years to find optimum solutions to large TSP instances. The largest TSP instance…
The Traveling Salesman Problem is one of the most studied problems in computational complexity and its approximability has been a long standing open question. Currently, the best known inapproximability threshold known is 220/219 due to…
Erdos, Herzog and Piranian asked whether, for $n$ points in the plane with fixed diameter (maximum distance between points), an arrangement of a regular $n$-gon maximizes their product of all pairs of distances. Recently, it was discovered…
In this paper, we consider differential approximability of the traveling salesman problem (TSP). We show that TSP is $3/4$-differential approximable, which improves the currently best known bound $3/4 -O(1/n)$ due to Escoffier and Monnot in…
Finding the exact integrality gap $\alpha$ for the LP relaxation of the metric Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) has been an open problem for over thirty years, with little progress made. It is known that $4/3 \leq \alpha \leq 3/2$, and a…
We describe an exact algorithm for finding the best 2-OPT move which, experimentally, was observed to be much faster than the standard quadratic approach. To analyze its average-case complexity, we introduce a family of heuristic procedures…
We prove that the number of unit distances among $n$ planar points is at most $1.94\cdot n^{4/3}$, improving on the previous best bound of $8n^{4/3}$. We also give better upper and lower bounds for several small values of $n$. We also prove…
Given a graph whose arc traversal times vary over time, the Time-Dependent Travelling Salesman Problem consists in finding a Hamiltonian tour of least total duration covering the vertices of the graph. The main goal of this work is to…
Given a complete edge-weighted graph G, we present a polynomial time algorithm to compute a degree-four-bounded spanning Eulerian subgraph of 2G that has at most 1.5 times the weight of an optimal TSP solution of G. Based on this algorithm…
If one places N cities randomly on a lattice of size L, we find that the normalized optimal travel distances per city in the Euclidean and Manhattan metrics vary monotonically with the city concentration p. We have studied such optimal…
In the Euclidean TSP with neighborhoods (TSPN), we are given a collection of $n$ regions (neighborhoods) and we seek a shortest tour that visits each region. In the path variant, we seek a shortest path that visits each region. We present…
Baader, J\"org, and Parlier recently established an upper bound for the crossing number of curve systems of size $m\asymp g^{1+\alpha}$ on a genus $g$ surface, obtaining a leading coefficient of $9/4=2.25$. Their construction relies on…
Let $P$ be a set of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and let $\alpha \ge 1$ be a real number. We define the distance between two points $p,q\in P$ as $|pq|^{\alpha}$, where $|pq|$ denotes the standard Euclidean distance between $p$ and $q$. We…
We consider LSTD($\lambda$), the least-squares temporal-difference algorithm with eligibility traces algorithm proposed by Boyan (2002). It computes a linear approximation of the value function of a fixed policy in a large Markov Decision…
Explicit lower bounds for the length of the shortest opaque set for the unit disc and the unit square in the Euclidean plane are derived. The results are based on an explicit application of the general method of Kawamura, Moriyama, Otachi…
In 1946 Erd\H os asked for the maximum number of unit distances, $u(n)$, among $n$ points in the plane. He showed that $u(n)> n^{1+c/\log\log n}$ and conjectured that this was the true magnitude. The best known upper bound is…
In the Tricolored Euclidean Traveling Salesperson problem, we are given~$k=3$ sets of points in the plane and are looking for disjoint tours, each covering one of the sets. Arora (1998) famously gave a PTAS based on ``patching'' for the…
We show that if P$\neq$NP, then a wide class of TSP heuristics fail to approximate the length of the TSP to asymptotic optimality, even for random Euclidean instances. Previously, this result was not even known for any heuristics (greedy,…
Arrangements of pseudolines are classic objects in discrete and computational geometry. They have been studied with increasing intensity since their introduction almost 100 years ago. The study of the number $B_n$ of non-isomorphic simple…