Artful Routes

A traveling salesman must visit customers in a given number of cities scattered across the country. The problem is to find the shortest route that takes the traveler just once to each city before returning home.

Approximately solving the traveling salesman problem for a set of 27,486 carefully placed cities produces an impressive likeness of the Mona Lisa. Courtesy of Robert Bosch

Magnified view of the route required to create part of a continuous-line portrait of the Mona Lisa.