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Travelling Santa Problem

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The Travelling Santa Problem (TSP) is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization studied in operations research and theoretical computer science.
Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find a shortest possible tour that visits each city exactly once.

Santa has a big problem with outlining his christmas route. To not overwork his reindeers, he would like to choose the shortest one. He will be travelling from town to town through all countries of the world.

You have to point out the optimal, that is the shortest, route for the Santa's Sleigh.

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Entertaining

Some routes are hard to solve, however, there could be some additional obstacles added. The game seems to base on simple math, but in some moments, it gets kind of annoying, especially when the difference between two routes is only a few pixels. It caused me guess much in certain levels.
Nonetheless, though simple and annoying, there is still something which makes me want to play the game.

Needs a 'twist'

The game is simple, travel the shortest route. however the 'energy' usage felt arbitrary, although it is probably the pixel distance of the shortest route.
right now the correct route is very obvious on most levels, perhaps the addition of some extra obstacles. here are some ideas for obstacles: Wind that causes extra energy usage, aircraft moving across the play area (moves only when Santa is moving), houses that can be only visited at certain times (eg must be the 3rd or later or must be the forth or sooner).
A display showing how much energy a 'jump' will use would be nice but may need to be confined to an easy mode.

Hardly a game.

This is a pretty poor excuse for a game. I'm sure those who are studying operations research and theoretical computer science will breeze through it, however that doesn't make this any good. There is no skill invloved, it's just dumb luck or going through every single option, there is no pattern, so what works well for one level might not work for another. Sometimes the solutions were the last logical thing that I would do.

Credits & Info

Views
3,207
Votes
4
Score
4.42 / 5.00

Uploaded
Dec 22, 2010
3:11 AM EST