A application in c++ to solve the Travelling Salesman Problem using ACO (Ant Colony System, a Meta-Heuristic and approximation algorithm).
The travelling Salesman Problem is a problem about, given a set of cities, find the shortest route visiting all the cities, ending in the same city that you start. This problem is a NP_Hard problem , so there isnt a algorithm that solve the problem in polynomial time. But, we can use algorithms and use metaheuristics to try to find a good a aproximation to the optimal solution. In this case I was hesitating between choosing, a Swarm algorithm, in specific the Ant Colony System or a evolutionary algorithm, the Genetic algorithm. In the end I have decided to use the Ant Colony System because I think that the general approach of this algorithm i'ts more similar and natural to apply to the Travelling Salesman Problem and the Ant Colony System was designed to for use with combinatorial problems, just like The Travelling Salesman problem.