Here are some project details for students enrolled in CSE521. It is not necessary to be enrolled in the course to participate in this project.
Electronic Submission of Tours I hope to set up electronic turnin to allow submission of tours. Details to be provided later.
Working in groups You are allowed to work in groups of at most three. Groups may turn in a single copy of their results. Collaborations between groups is allowed, provided that it is fully documented, for example, sharing source code is permitted. (Of course, final results of the form "Here are my results of running Bob's code" will not get much credit!).
Deadlines By January 25, you should have a working code, which at the minimum can generate valid tours. You will need to submit tours for some of the problem instances (details to be provided later).
Spefically, you should find a tour of tri.3 (city 0, time 100) of length 6 days, 7 hours, 3 minutes (this is optimal), and you should find a tour of uk.100 (city 99, time 600) of length at most two months (<= 60 days).
The deadline for turning in the final report is Friday, March 8.
What to turn in The final report should consist of a summary of your codes, as well as an analysis of what worked, and what didn't. You should provide justification of why your algorithms work - a few lemmas and theorems wouldn't hurt. You do not need to turn in your source code.
My advice is that you keep a log of your work on this project throughout the course - when you invent a new algorithm, write a summary of it and record the results. Negative results are also worth recording - lots of good ideas don't work out. If you keep a fairly complete log, then it should be easy to convert it into the final report.
Grading Your grade for the project will be based on your final report, on your solutions of various project instances, and on my subjective impression of your work throughout the quarter. I would like to meet with all groups during the quarter to keep track of your progress on the project.
Computing You are on your own to find computing cycles. Although it is possible to use an unbounded amount of cycles on branch and bound or simulated annealling, you should not use excessive amounts of CPU time. As a rule of thumb, no individual run should take more than five minutes. (There will be no enforcement of this, unless it becomes obvious that there is a resource crunch caused by CSE521.)