IN THE course of his studies, every engineer encounters - and attempts to solve - the travelling salesman problem. In essence, this is an optimisation challenge that involves helping an itinerant salesman visit a series of towns by covering as short a distance as possible, and without visiting any town twice.

What is truly fascinating about this decades-old puzzle is the clash between the utter simplicity of its formulation, and the sheer complexity of identifying the solution, especially when considering a large number of towns. Beyond the headaches this problem has caused engineering students, it has spawned considerable innovation in the fields of discrete optimisation and programming. On these rest the well-oiled supply chains, delivery services and manufacturing processes so essential to our lives today.

Although no educator will deny the elegance and importance of the travelling salesman problem, it runs the risk of being the overriding paradigm that courses through an engineer's educational experience - one that prizes, above all else, efficiency, resource minimisation, and speed.