Animation of the Traveling Salesman Problem

Visualization of algorithms has become increasingly more popular as classrooms are upgraded with better technology and graphically interactive systems. This technique is attractive to educators and students alike. With increased performance in languages such as Java and the ease of implementation for graphical interfaces, one can construct graphical systems for effectively animating and visualizing algorithms. In this paper, we present an implementation of such a system for The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Our goal is to bring TSP to life by graphically representing the states of two popular solutions to this problem, namely backtracking and branch and bound, and animating the transitions between those states.