Great stuff from Norvig, as per usual. I find it strange that the next step after enumeration is a heuristic approach, something that comes up a lot in "solve a

Great stuff from Norvig, as per usual. I find it strange that the next step after enumeration is a heuristic approach, something that comes up a lot in "solve a TSP" posts - there are many ways to solve TSP to provable optimality that perform really well on non-pathological instances, and can often be stopped at any point to get both a probably near optimal solution and, even better, a bound on how good the best solution could be. I would argue that the implementation cost is outweighed by the possibility of usually getting optimal solutions and by having confidence in how far off you are (no chance of producing a terrible solution).