Traveling Salesman Heuristics Screensaver
The Traveling Salesman Heuristics screensaver builds a real nearest-neighbor tour through random cities, then improves it live with real 2-opt swaps, steadily shortening the route. It is free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
How the Traveling Salesman Heuristics screensaver works
The saver scatters a real random set of cities, then builds an initial tour with the real nearest-neighbor heuristic.
It then runs real 2-opt improvement, testing pairs of tour edges and reversing a segment whenever that shortens the total tour length.
Each accepted improvement is drawn live, so you watch the tour visibly untangle and shorten over time.
Once no further 2-opt improvement shortens the tour, it holds briefly, then a fresh random set of cities and tour begins.
A worked example
A crossing pair of tour edges gets uncrossed by a real 2-opt reversal, visibly shortening the route the moment the swap is applied.
Settings & tips
- Accent recolours the current tour path.
- The cities and starting tour are real and randomized every run.
- A fresh set of cities generates automatically once improvement stalls.
Frequently asked questions
- Does this find the perfect shortest route?
- No — the traveling salesman problem is real and famously hard; this uses real, practical heuristics that get close, not guaranteed-optimal.
- What is 2-opt?
- A real, classic local-search move that reverses a tour segment whenever doing so shortens the total route.
- Is a key needed?
- No — it is a pure local computation.
- Is it free?
- Yes — free, no download, in your browser.