OOC: how did you create your initial random loop? This was a Kaggle problem about seven years ago. The competitive solutions found a good initial guess by break

OOC: how did you create your initial random loop? This was a Kaggle problem about seven years ago. The competitive solutions found a good initial guess by breaking up the domain into a grid. They would solve TSP in each grid cell, and then stitch these solutions together to get a reasonable initial global solution. If you created your initial loop greedily (as I did) you got a garbage solution, and also wasted a lot of time that you could have spent doing random swaps or simulated annealing.