Given a set of cities and distance between every pair of cities, the problem is to find the shortest possible route that visits every city exactly once and returns to the starting point.
The nearest neighbour algorithm was one of the first algorithms used to determine a solution to the travelling salesman problem. In it, the salesman starts at a random city and repeatedly visits the nearest city until all have been visited. It quickly yields a short tour, but usually not the optimal one.
In computer science and operations research, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection that belongs to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Genetic algorithms are commonly used to generate high-quality solutions to optimization and search problems by relying on bio-inspired operators such as mutation, crossover and selection.