Travelling Salesman

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The movie is fantastic and quite good mathematically. It is a bit like the play by the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt who wrote Die Physiker similarly discussing scientific ethics questions. A mysterious bodyguard is listening to all of the conversations (which is a bit strange, given that everything is so top secret). In Dürrenmatts’ play, there is a psychiatrist Mathilde von Zahnd who eavesdrops on the conversation. In the Travelling Salesman movie, there is also a bit of cold war atmosphere, similarly as in the 1962 play of Duerrenmatt, when NATO and WTO were the players.

A detail: Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin formulated the P=NP problem. The mathematicians Michael Garey and David S Johnson were mentioned, who worked on the Traveling Salesman Problem and wrote Computers and intractability.