Summary: To appear in Proc. 27'th ACM Symposium on Theory Of Computing (STOC), May 1995 1
Improved Approximation Guarantees for Minimum­Weight k­Trees and
Prize­Collecting Salesmen
Baruch Awerbuch \Lambda Yossi Azar y Avrim Blum z Santosh Vempala z
Abstract
Consider a salesperson that must sell some quota
of brushes in order to win a trip to Hawaii. This
salesperson has a map (a weighted graph) in which
each city has an attached demand specifying the
number of brushes that can be sold in that city.
What is the best route to take to sell the quota
while traveling the least distance possible? Notice
that unlike the standard traveling salesman prob­
lem, not only do we need to figure out the order
in which to visit the cities, but we must decide
the more fundamental question: which cities do
we want to visit?
In this paper we give the first approximation al­
gorithms with poly­logarithmic performance guar­
antees for this problem, as well as for the slightly

Source: Awerbuch, Baruch - Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences