To some degree he’s just rediscovered branch and bound, the classic way to solve NP hard problems like this. It’s a neat little trick. The other way of doing t

To some degree he’s just rediscovered branch and bound, the classic way to solve NP hard problems like this. It’s a neat little trick. The other way of doing this would just be to formulate it as some kind of ILP and plug it into somebody else’s solver, quicker but there’s no way it’d work as well.