Typically the first program you write when you are learning a programming language is, "Hello World!".  Due to the popularity of my prior post on optimizing the traveling salesman problem with genetic algorithms I decided to write a general parallelized Genetic Algorithm Framework for LabVIEW, naturally the first thing I taught it to do was to say, "Hello World!".

As a follow up to the post, Bowling Kata - Unit Test Framework written by Jon McBee, I will be following the same Bowling Game Kata by Robert C. Martin using the JKI VI Tester.  Because the original kata was written in Java, you will notice that Jon and I took different approaches when translating it to LabVIEW. You will also see differences based on the unit testing tools we each used. Hopefully you will find these differences interesting and informative.  To give another valuable perspective, Omar Mussa will follow up with a post that goes through the kata using Caraya.

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a problem in Graph Theory requiring the discovery of the most efficient route a salesman can travel through the multiple cities.  As an example if the salesman's route included 20 cities he would have to choose the most efficient of 20! = 2432902008176640000 possible routes (If he evaluated one solution every second it would take over 77 Billion years).  Having that many possible routes to chose from makes optimization of the solution difficult and the optimization problem gets harder as the number of cities increases.

The Bowling Game Kata is a very well known coding exercise created by Robert C. Martin geared towards practicing Test Driven Development (TDD).  My cohort Russell Blake from G Systems was reading through Robert Martin's fantastic book, "Agile Software Development" where he came across the Bowling Game Kata and had the brilliant idea of recreating it in LabVIEW and blogging about it.  We decided to each go through the kata with a different unit test tool and blog about our experience, I will be going through the kata using the LabVIEW Unit Test Framework Toolkit (UTF), Russell will follow up with a post that goes through the kata with JKI's VI Tester.