Rand McNally 7710 GPS
Is there a way this GPS can be program to put in order multiple yard sales so you don’t have to drive back and forth? Thanks for all comments!
Forum Discussion
My (Magellan) GPS can optimize the order of waypoints in a trip to have the "shortest" distance, independent of the routing algorithm between the waypoints. I think the button is labeled "optimize trip" or something like that. I assume it's basing the ordering on straight-line distances as the crow flies, not on road distances; but that at least keeps one from going from Philadelphia to Baltimore via Orlando.
The traveling salesman problem is not so much impossible to solve as there is no known way to do so short of an exhaustive search...in other words, to get the optimum solution, you need to try every possible permutation of your stops. For a relatively small number of stops, that's not really a problem even for the little computer in a GPS. There are plenty of heuristic ways to get a decent solution in practice (but not necessarily the single best solution) much more efficiently.
The traveling salesman problem is not so much impossible to solve as there is no known way to do so short of an exhaustive search...in other words, to get the optimum solution, you need to try every possible permutation of your stops. For a relatively small number of stops, that's not really a problem even for the little computer in a GPS. There are plenty of heuristic ways to get a decent solution in practice (but not necessarily the single best solution) much more efficiently.
