PathGame: Crowdsourcing Time-Constrained Human Solutions for the Travelling Salesperson Problem

Human strategies for solving the travelling salesperson problem (TSP) continue to draw the attention of the researcher community, both to further understanding of human decision-making and inspiration for the design of automated solvers. Online games represent an efficient way of collecting large amounts of human solutions to the TSP, and PathGame is a game focusing on non-Euclideanclosed-form TSP. To capture the instinctive decision-making process of the users, PathGame requires users to solve the problem as quickly as possible, while still favouring more efficient tours. In the initial study presented here, we have used PathGame to collect a dataset of over 16,000 tours, containing over 22,000,000 destinations. Our analysis of the data revealed new insights related to ways in which humans solve TSP and the time it takes them when forced to solve TSPs of large complexity quickly.