TSP

Tsp is an abbreviation that can refer to multiple concepts. The two most common meanings are a unit of culinary measure and a classic optimization problem in mathematics and computer science.

Teaspoon (abbreviated tsp) is a unit of volume used in cooking and medicine. In the United States customary system, one teaspoon equals 1/6 of a fluid ounce, about 4.93 milliliters. In many metric contexts the teaspoon is taken as 5 milliliters. Three teaspoons make one tablespoon. Teaspoons are used to measure small quantities of liquid or dry ingredients in recipes, for dosing medicines, and for labeling nutritional information.

Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a widely studied optimization problem. Given a set of cities and the distances between every pair, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the starting city. The problem is NP-hard, meaning there is no known algorithm that solves all instances efficiently as the number of cities grows. Exact methods exist, such as dynamic programming (the Held–Karp algorithm) and integer programming formulations, but they become impractical for large instances. For the metric TSP, where distances satisfy the triangle inequality, several approximation algorithms are known; for example, Christofides’ algorithm guarantees a tour no longer than 1.5 times the optimum. In practice, TSP models are used to study routing efficiency in logistics, vehicle routing, manufacturing, and related optimization problems, often serving as benchmarks for heuristics and approximation schemes.