On the Nearest Neighbor Rule for the Metric Traveling Salesman Problem

We present a very simple family of traveling salesman instances with $n$ cities where the nearest neighbor rule may produce a tour that is $\Theta(\log n)$ times longer than an optimum solution. Our family works for the graphic, the euclidean, and the rectilinear traveling salesman problem at the same time. It improves the so far best known lower bound in the euclidean case and proves for the first time a lower bound in the rectilinear case

The Approximation Ratio of the 2-Opt Heuristic for the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem

The 2-Opt heuristic is a simple improvement heuristic for the Traveling Salesman Problem. It starts with an arbitrary tour and then repeatedly replaces two edges of the tour by two other edges, as long as this yields a shorter tour. We will prove that for Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problems with n cities the approximation ratio of the 2-Opt heuristic is ?(log n / log log n). This improves the upper bound of O(log n) given by Chandra, Karloff, and Tovey [Barun Chandra et al., 1999] in 1999

On packing squares into a rectangle

AbstractWe prove that every set of squares with total area 1 can be packed into a rectangle of area at most 2867/2048=1.399… . This improves on the previous best bound of 1.53. Also, our proof yields a linear time algorithm for finding such a packing