tsp: the Traveling Salesperson Problem, seeks the shortest round trip on a graph that visits every node exactly once. There is no algorithm that is guaranteed to produce the best solution. We will look at brute force for small problems, some simple approaches that seem likely to handle moderate problems, discover that even visiting the 48 "mainland" state capitals is NOT a moderate problem, and then see that an approach suggested by Cleve Moler does a very good job on that problem.
Lecture notes: