Travelling Salesman
- 2012
- 1h 20m
IMDb RATING
5.8/10
1.4K
YOUR RATING
Four mathematicians are hired by the US government to solve the most powerful problem in computer science history.Four mathematicians are hired by the US government to solve the most powerful problem in computer science history.Four mathematicians are hired by the US government to solve the most powerful problem in computer science history.
- Awards
- 1 win
Photos
- Director
- Writers
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe original draft of the screenplay was written in 2009, years before leaked NSA information detailing cyber-espionage was revealed--a topic discussed directly in the film.
- GoofsEarly in the film, the character Tim Horton asks a colleague about the characteristics of a desert. The colleague replies that they are 'hot'. This is not true, since Antarctica is a desert and is not thought of as being 'hot'. There are many ways to classify an area as a desert. Two of the main methods are that total precipitation is less than 10 inches, and the evaporation being greater than precipitation. 'Hot' is too subjective a term since many people will disagree on what qualifies as 'hot'.
- Quotes
[last lines]
No. 1 - Tim Horton: Don't blink. You might miss something.
Featured review
Not much on the technical side !!!
I recently took a course offered by Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck @ Coursera called "Discrete Optimization." The course was about solving the NP Complete problems like 'Travelling Salesman', 'Graph Coloring', 'Vehicle Routing', 'Warehouse Locations' and so on. The course was very fascinating and at most challenging. The movie is based on the premises that NP problems, or Non- deterministic Polynomial time problems are not solvable in reasonable time. Even moderately sized such problems might take trillions of years with modern computing power. So, brute-force search is out of the question. For this reason, modern cryptography are based on this assumption. When mathematicians in the movie break this assumption and prove that P = NP, i.e. such problems can actually be solved in polynomial time, there are many implications. There is a moral dilemma that it might be used unethically and also such discoveries shouldn't be locked out and classified. As my professor put it, solving(optimizing) NP problems is the most important challenge that no one has heard about. I am really grateful to this movie for addressing this issue. But other than that, there isn't much for me in it. I was expecting a little more math and knowledge about their non-deterministic processor. But the movie is catered more towards the layman, which is perfectly understandable. Instead of just trivial and heuristic solutions, the movie could have mentioned few complete algorithms just to get some credibility amongst mathematics community. For those of you interested, there is a million dollar Millennium Prize offered by Clay Mathematics Institute for proving if P = NP or P != NP .
helpful•1412
- thethakuri
- Sep 15, 2013
- How long is Travelling Salesman?Powered by Alexa
Details
- Runtime1 hour 20 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.78 : 1
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content