I was excitedly reading through this article eager to learn how the solution worked. Instead, there was a bunch of (to me, as a mathematician) uninteresting det

I was excitedly reading through this article eager to learn how the solution worked. Instead, there was a bunch of (to me, as a mathematician) uninteresting detail about how to massage the data with Python. Once the data was in the right shape, feed it to something we will treat as a black box. I get it that sometimes this is ok. It's perfectly fine to not care about how everything works. I am just disappointed that a blog post about the TSP doesn't contain any actual details about how to solve the TSP. If I were to write such a blog post (and I have written things of this ilk), I would spend a lot more time trying to elucidate the solver's algorithm. I like explaning algorithms.[1] That's how I feel that I've really understood a particular subject. I suppose overall this makes me quite a different sort of person than the author. I could never tolerate running Mac OS X for any length of time, because being inconvenienced to use the debugger I want (Mac OS X's signing makes it very annoying to run gdb) and being unable to put debugging calls into my OS kernel are unacceptable compromises for me. But people who like black boxes seem to really like black boxes all the way down to the OS they're using. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medcouple#Fast_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medcouple#Fast_algorithm