I think that the department will be providing Pizza. I'll offer the added incentive that anyone who comes to a talk and sends the department a summary of your reactions to the candidate gets one point of extra credit in the class. As before, we can do a brute force solution which requires exponential time. That is, we list all the cycles and pick the smallest. Surprisingly, all of the known algorithms for solving TSP are exponential.
Exponential solutions are generally unacceptable.
Take CS301 and CS341 to find out. In order to implement any of the aforementioned algorithms, we'll need a Graph data structure. While we had suggested that it is easiest to represent graphs as nodes, this isn't always the case. For example, note that in some algorithms we needed to mark all the nodes in the graph. In others, we needed a list of all the edges.