Mathematicians have found the shortest route to visit 2 million stars

By Leah Crane

Roskilde University and University of Waterloo

We have found the best path to take between the stars. The travelling salesman problem, an infamous mathematical puzzle that seeks the shortest route between many locations while visiting each only once and returning to the first, has been solved on the largest scale yet: the galaxy.

The travelling salesman problem seems simple, but it is notoriously difficult. It can be solved for specific data sets, but a general algorithm to solve any instance of the problem hasn’t yet been …