In the March 1997 issue of Scientific American, Shawn Carlson described a remarkable algorithm for tackling challenging problems, like the Travelling Salesman problem, by adopting the approach "Nature uses" when a metal anneals or when a crystal forms. The algorithm is called "simulated annealing" and was implemented in C.
EuroSoft has converted the C code to Visual Basic and provided an easy-to-use visual interface which makes it extremely straightforward to solve the Travelling Salesman's problem for visiting anything from 10 to 3000 arbitrary cities, the location of each city being specified by its x- and y- co-ordinates. On a 166MHz Pentium PC, for example, a 200-city problem takes around 5 to 6 minutes, and a 1000-city problem about 1 hour.
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