VECTORLIST - The Mailing List For The Technical Discussion of Vector-Based Arcade Games

June_1998
Re: Redesign of boards...


From: Andrew Wilson ( )
Date: Fri Jun 05 1998 - 13:54:30 CDT


>On a side note, this sounds a lot like the traveling salesman puzzle where one
>tries to find the quickest route for a salesman that must visit a bunch of
>cities.

        Ooooh. Good insight, Zonn! I didn't see this connection before.

        Yah, finding the *optimal* route is NP-complete (meaning no
polynomial-time algorithm exists), but given an arbitrary unsorted set of
line segments you generally can order them such that the total time to draw
them is (possibly significantly) shorter than the time to draw the original
unsorted set. It's only finding the optimal ordering that is hard.

                        Drew


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