Sometimes

The famous Travelling Salesman Problem is easy to state: given a number of cities on a map, find the shortest path which visits each one and returns to the starting point. It’s easy to write a program to solve it, but as the number of cities increases, it quickly becomes impossibly slow, even on modern computers. Why, then, would anyone try solving it hundreds of thousands of times? Maybe if someone did, we might learn something new about this famous problem, or about the even more famous question about P versus NP. Sometimes it’s worth doing something foolish like that.