copied directly from Wikipedia: "The travelling salesman problem (TSP) asks the following question: Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, important in operations research and theoretical computer science." ...and for NP-hard Wikipedia verbosely describes a tough challenge as: "NP-hard (Non-deterministic Polynomial-time hard), in computational complexity theory, is a class of problems that are, informally, 'at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP'. More precisely, a problem H is NP-hard when every problem L in NP can be reduced in polynomial time to H. As a consequence, finding a polynomial algorithm to solve any NP-hard problem would give polynomial algorithms for all the problems in NP, which is unlikely as many of them are considered hard." ...while another gem is: "combinatorial optimization is a topic that consists of finding an optimal object from a finite set of objects"
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