+ elite-salesman [-OPTIONS] GALAXY [START]
+
+ Solver for the Travelling Salesman Problem. Plots a route
+ around (a connected subgraph of) GALAXY. The START planet has
+ two related purposes:
+
+ * It identifies which subgraph to tour. If the galaxy is split
+ into mutually unreachable subsets, it's obviously impossible
+ to visit the whole lot.
+
+ * If you specify the `-nocycle' option (see below), then START
+ is the starting place for the tour.
+
+ The following options affect the problem to be solved:
+
+ -w WEIGHT Choose how to weight journeys. This has the
+ same meaning as in `elite-path'. The default is
+ to minimize the number of hops.
+
+ -d DIST Distance we can travel in one hop, in
+ lightyears.
+
+ -cycle Find a cyclic route through the galaxy (i.e., so
+ that when you finish, you come back to where you
+ started). You can use a cyclic solution to tour
+ a galaxy from any starting point. This is the
+ default.
+
+ -nocycle Find a route which begins at START, covers
+ all the planets, and then stops. Presumably you
+ use a galactic hyperdrive to get to the next
+ galaxy, or something.
+
+ The solution is displayed as a list of planet summaries. An
+ indented line indicates a world you have to visit just to get
+ somewhere else.
+
+ The program doesn't compute an optimal solution -- doing so
+ would be very slow indeed, since the Travelling Salesman Problem
+ is NP complete. Instead, it uses a technique called `simulated
+ annealing' to try to home in on a good solution. There are a
+ number of options you can use to tweak this process. The
+ default settings produce relatively good answers, but take about
+ five minutes to run. Try playing with them, and see what sorts
+ of results you get.
+
+ -temp The initial temperature of the system. The
+ temperature controls how willing the process is
+ to accept a move which increases the journey
+ cost -- a high temperature means that `bad'
+ moves are more likely to be accepted. The
+ temperature should initially be greater than the
+ maximum possible cost of exchanging two hops on
+ the route. The default is 1024, for no
+ particularly good reason.
+
+ -cool Cooling factor. Each cooling cycle, the
+ temperature is reduced by this factor. It
+ should be a little greater than 1. The default
+ is 1.001. Smaller values (nearer 1) take longer
+ but tend to produce better results.
+
+ -inner Number of swapping iterations to do each cooling
+ cycle. The default is 10000.
+
+ -dead The number of `dead' cycles (ones in which we
+ never make an improving move) before we give up
+ and accept the solution. The default is 200,
+ which seems to work OK.
+
+ Simulated annealing is an interesting technique which is
+ applicable to a wide variety of optimization problems. There
+ are some decent descriptions on the 'net -- try asking Google
+ about it.
+
+