Imagine that you manage a small fulfillment center and need to deliver packages to a list of customers using a single vehicle. What is the best route for the vehicle to take so that you visit all your customers and then return to the starting point? This is an example of the classic TSP.
The TSP dates back to 1930, and since then has been and is one of the most thoroughly studied problems in optimization. It is often used to benchmark optimization algorithms. The problem has many variants, but it was originally based on a traveling salesman that needs to take a trip covering several cities:
"Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of the cities, find the shortest possible path that goes through all the cities, and returns to the starting city."
Using combinatorics, you could find that when given n cities, the number of possible paths...