  In the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), a list of cities and the distances
between them are given. The goal is to find the shortest possible route that
visits each city exactly once and returns to the original city. The TSP has a
wide range of applications in many different industries including, but not
limited to, optimizing mail and shipping routes, guiding industrial machines,
mapping genomes, and improving autonomous vehicles. For centuries, traveling
salesmen, politicians, and circuit preachers have tackled their own versions of
the problem. Within the last century, the TSP has become one of the most
important problems in the fields of mathematics and computer science. The time
to find an exact solution is often impractically long, which has led to the
development of numerous approximation techniques, ranging from linear
programming methods to nature-inspired models. Here, we present a novel N-body
approach to the TSP.
