Exact Solutions to the Traveling Salesperson Problem by a Population-Based Evolutionary Algorithm

This articles introduces a (μ + 1)-EA, which is proven to be an exact TSP problem solver for a population of exponential size. We will show non-trivial upper bounds on the runtime until an optimum solution has been found. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time it has been shown that an $\mathcal{NP}$-hard problem is solved exactly instead of approximated only by a black box algorithm.

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