The classic traveling salesman problem asks us to find the shortest route that that goes through each of a given set of cities precisely once before returning to the initiail city. If A, B and C are any three cities, the distance from A to C is always shorter than the sum of the distances from A to B and then from B to C. This is known as the triangle inequality. The general traveling salesman problem is obtained when the triangle inequality is not required. This would be the case when we place arbitrary positive numbers in an n X n matrix and, starting with the first row, we attempt to...