This is your repository for Cities task solution.

Available cities are present in input.txt. Results should be written into output.txt file.

All the code for reading/writing files is already present, so you can focus on solving the task.

Place your code in combine_cities method of main.cpp file:

vector<string> combine_cities(vector<string> available_cities) {
  // TODO replace with your solution!
  return vector<string>();
}

Run main method in main.cpp file and verify that output.txt file is updated:

Detailed description of the task is here

Happy coding! 😉

In new solution I used the ant search algorithm with some modifications:

• the lower and upper limits of pheromones on the edges of the graph
• elite ants to increase the number of pheromones on the edges of a better way

The one of the main differences is the possibility of the ant returning to the previous vertex of the graph and its passage along other available edges(like a depth-first search algorithm)

Also a key difference is the change in the coefficient Beta if the path improvement has not occurred after a certain number of iterations.

As a result I achieved a 16705 characters in 148346 iterations (WOW) spending only 17584.4 seconds. It should be noted that the maximum result that was achieved in the process of experiments 16715 characters(please see the file best_way.txt).

Therefore, I believe that my algorithm is the best of the proposed solutions here.