Solution of the traveling salesman problem with an adaptive ring

A ring of nodes adapts, using Kohonen learning, to form a complete circuit through N cities in the plane. The algorithm is simple because the topology of the solution is contained in the definition of the network and does not need to be imposed as an external constraint. A ten-city problem is used to demonstrate several variants of the basic algorithm which address different problems in the mapping of a Kohonen network to a discrete distribution. The algorithm is also applied to the thirty-city problem, and its performance is compared to that of other simple heuristics.<>