CSC 662: Given a List of Cities and the Distances between Each Pair of Cities: Artificial Intelligence Assignment, SUSS, Singapore

Assignment Details:

Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, the traveling salesman problem (TSP) asks to find the shortest possible route that visits each city only once and returns to the origin city.

The TSP can be solved via the minimum spanning tree (MST) heuristic, which is used to estimate the cost of completing a tour, given that a partial tour has already been constructed.

The MST cost of a set of cities is the smallest sum of the link costs of any tree that connects all the cities. Use Prim’s algorithm for constructing the MST.

1. For each of the following questions, give pseudocode of the proposed algorithm, and analyze its time and space complexities.
(a) Design an algorithm to solve the TSP based on the A* algorithm.
(b) Design an algorithm to solve the TSP based on a hill-climbing approach.
(c) Design an RBFS (Recursive Best First Search) algorithm to solve the
TSP.

2. Use one of the following programming languages for your implementation: Java, Python, C++, C, or MATLAB.

(a) Implement the proposed algorithms and evaluate their performances on:

i. The datasets a280.xml and att48.xml.

(b) Compare the performance results of the three algorithms and discuss their strength and weaknesses.