This is the best general brief reference to simulated anealing I know.  It includes solution of the Travelling Salesman problem and the problem of routing metallisation patterns on integrated circuits.  It is nicely written and very accessible (unlike most of the technical books and papers!).

Simulated annealing is a Monte Carlo calculation which implements a global minimisation algorithm that works for (nearly) arbitrary functions.  Simple minimisation algorithms find only local minima, but simulated annealing is able to jump out of local minima!  Its all very clever!  Read the paper!

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