With neither minds nor maps- chemical-sensing immune players do well with decades-old mathematical problem, a computer simulation reveals.

A theoretical physicist named Eugene Wigner once referred to “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” -- a phrase that, on first hearing, sounds paradoxical. Math seems like rationality itself, ...

The paper describes a new algorithm to produce r-optimal tours for the travelling salesman problem. This algorithm is faster than the original r-optimal method, and computation times increase much ...

Forget GPS. With no fancy maps or even brains, immune system cells can solve a simple version of the traveling-salesman problem, a computational conundrum that has vexed mathematicians for decades.

After Karp’s paper was published, many computer scientists set their sights on creating an efficient algorithm to find approximate solutions to the traveling salesman problem — round-trip ...