More Approaches to the Travelling Salesman Guide

Sir-In David G. Bounds's interesting exposition[1] of several intriguing new approaches to combinatorial optimization, he is unfortunately and seriously misleading when he suggests that these new approaches "seem likely to lead to much better algorithms for finding acceptably low-cost minima" for the travelling salesman problem (TSP). The Lin-Kernighan algorithm[2], well-known to researchers in computer science and operations research but apparently not to Bounds or many of the authors of his references, substantially outperforms all these approaches, both in speed and the quality of solution found.