  The hitting set problem asks for a collection of sets over a universe $U$ to
find a minimum subset of $U$ that intersects each of the given sets. It is
NP-hard and equivalent to the problem set cover. We give a branch-and-bound
algorithm to solve hitting set. Though it requires exponential time in the
worst case, it can solve many practical instances from different domains in
reasonable time. Our algorithm outperforms a modern ILP solver, the
state-of-the-art for hitting set, by at least an order of magnitude on most
instances.
