Skip to main content

Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications

Product ID: Articles
Supplementary Print
Undergraduate
High School

Traveling Door to Door with a DNA Computer

Author: Timothy P. Chartier, Deborah A. Moore, Lorne W. Walker


Many real-world applications can be modeled with directed networks and posed as a Traveling Sales Problem (TSP). However, finding a solution to a TSP is often computationally intractable. This paper proposes a modification to a method developed by Leonard Adleman to solve the Hamiltonian Path Problem. The method uses the properties of DNA molecules to encode and manipulate data, which allows for massive parallel computations. The proposed method can find a solution to the TSP. This paper is intended for a broad audience with a basic understanding of graph theory. No prior knowledge of the biological properties of DNA is presumed.

©2005 by COMAP, Inc.
The UMAP Journal 26.4
17 pages

Mathematics Topics:

Number Theory, Optimization, Graph Theory

Application Areas:

Molecular Biology, Travel

You must have a Full Membership to download this resource.

If you're already a member, login here.

Not yet a member?