Fig.1 – (click to enlarge) The optimal shortest path among N=1265 points depicting a Portuguese Navalheira crab as a result of one of our latest Swarm-Intelligence based algorithms. The problem of finding the shortest path among N different points in space is NP-hard, known as the Travelling Salesmen Problem (TSP), being one of the major and hardest benchmarks in Combinatorial Optimization (link) and Artificial Intelligence. (V. Ramos, D. Rodrigues, 2012)

This summer my kids just grab a tiny Portuguese Navalheira crab on the shore. After a small photo-session and some baby-sitting with a lettuce leaf, it was time to release it again into the ocean. He not only survived my kids, as he is now entitled into a new World Wide Web on-line life. After the Shortest path Sardine (link) with 1084 points, here is the Crab with 1265 points. The algorithm just run as little as 110 iterations.

Fig. 2 – (click to enlarge) Our 1265 initial points depicting a TSP Portuguese Navalheira crab. Could you already envision a minimal tour between all these points?

As usual in Travelling Salesmen problems (TSP) we start it with a set of points, in our case 1084 points or cities (fig. 2). Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is now to find the shortest possible tour that visits each city exactly once. The problem was first formulated as a mathematical problem in 1930 and is one of the most intensively studied problems in optimization. It is used as a benchmark for many optimization methods.

Fig. 3 – (click to enlarge) Again the shortest path Navalheira crab, where the optimal contour path (in black: first fig. above) with 1265 points (or cities) was filled in dark orange.

TSP has several applications even in its purest formulation, such as planning, logistics, and the manufacture of microchips. Slightly modified, it appears as a sub-problem in many areas, such as DNA sequencing. In these applications, the concept city represents, for example, customers, soldering points, or DNA fragments, and the concept distance represents travelling times or cost, or a similarity measure between DNA fragments. In many applications, additional constraints such as limited resources or time windows make the problem considerably harder.

What follows (fig. 4) is the original crab photo after image segmentation and just before adding Gaussian noise in order to retrieve several data points for the initial TSP problem. The algorithm was then embedded with the extracted x,y coordinates of these data points (fig. 2) in order for him to discover the minimal path, in just 110 iterations. For extra details, pay a visit onto the Shortest path Sardine (link) done earlier.

Fig. 4 – (click to enlarge) The original crab photo after some image processing as well as segmentation and just before adding Gaussian noise in order to retrieve several data points for the initial TSP problem.