Each individual is a full tour — a permutation of every city. Fitness is 1 / total distance, so shorter loops win. Every generation runs tournament selection (pick a few, keep the best), order crossover (OX) to splice a slice of one parent into the city order of another while keeping the permutation legal, then swap / reverse mutation — reversal is what unties the tangled crossings. The current champion is copied forward unchanged via elitism, so the best score never regresses. The small graph (top-right) tracks best distance over time.
TSP is NP-hard: the number of possible tours grows factorially, so brute force is hopeless past a handful of cities. Genetic algorithms don't guarantee the optimum, but they reliably converge to near-optimal solutions for routing, logistics, chip layout, and scheduling — a vivid demonstration of evolutionary search on combinatorial optimization.
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