What is the traveling salesman problem?

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What is the traveling salesman problem?

The traveling salesman problem is a well-known computational problem in computer science and mathematics. It involves finding the shortest possible route that a salesman can take to visit a set of cities and return to the starting city, while visiting each city exactly once. The problem is considered NP-hard, meaning that there is no known efficient algorithm to solve it for large numbers of cities. It has applications in various fields, such as logistics, transportation, and network optimization.