How long would it take for me to program a travelling salesman program with 5 nodes?

I'm considering doing a travelling salesman problem for my computing coursework and would like to know how long a standard computer would take to work out the shortest route between 5 different places. I just want to know if the开发者_C百科 project is viable. Thanks in advance! I will be using VB express.

How many possible routes are there? Informally, surely not many? Formally, I'll let you work that out. How long would it take you with a paper and pencil to list them and find the shortest? Surely less than 5 minutes? So that gives you an idea that it's not going to tax even a slow computer.

It might be an idea to do the paper and pencil thing for 5 and 6 nodes and make sure you understand what happens as the number of nodes increases, and hence why this problem starts to get hard as the nunmber of nodes gets big.

A straightforward solution of Traveling Salesman Problem with 5 places requires enumerating 5! paths. 5! = 1*2*3*4*5 = 120. Enumerating 120 paths has not been a big deal for any modern computer since, I guess, 80's.

But of course, If you want to make it slow, you can always write your program awfully badly, especially in VB.