The movie revolves around perhaps the greatest problem in computer science P vs. NP. Most things we rely on in the world, assume that P is not equal to NP -- that creating a code is way easier than cracking it, that figuring out whether a cure for cancer is effective is way easier than finding the cure in the first place. Traveling Salesman doesn't analyze the problem. Instead, it asks, what if P == NP? In other words, what if codes are just as easy to crack as they are to create? What if finding a cure for cancer is just as easy as showing a cure you've found works. Most scientists today don't believe this is true, but it has not yet been proved, which makes for an interesting, what if it's true discussion.The dialog is good, exploring the ramifications of a P == NP world. Somehow, it left me wanting more.

Far from being a "smart" movie like many reviewers here praise it, this movie is written by people playing make believe with characters who are suppose to be far more intelligent than the writers can claim to be. As a result, the dialogue is laughable. I've literally never seen a movie try SO HARD to be edgy and smart and yet be so vague and shallow. The characters in this movie are don't resemble real people, especially not top mathematicians and computer scientists. They're a fantasy of the creators who pretend that they know what it's like to be really super duper smart and work on something really super duper important. So we get a collection of vague, generic, shallow musings of the type that non-geniuses apparently think geniuses spend their time thinking about. And the characters always talk as if the audience is in the room but can't be let in on the secret. Just speak directly about what you're talking about instead of making indirect references to everything. But okay, that's not nearly as edgy and smart so we can't have that right guys? The pretentiousness is overbearing. Not to mention the occasional blatantly incorrect reference or analogy (demonstrating that the writers don't really understand the problem well enough, which makes me wonder why they're so caught up trying to make super smart and deep dialogue about a problem they don't understand?). Stop trying so hard, people. And let's stop making absurd caricatures of math genius.

I believe it is a travesty that this film has such a low score on here. The only thing I can attribute it to is that today's viewers have an attention span of a raccoon trapped in a treasure chest. I suppose the fact that I am a very big fan of this type of film--and what I mean by that is chock full intelligent dialog--may also have something to do with that. There are two other films that have always been in my top 10 favorite films list because of this attribute and they are 12 Angry Men, and The Man From Earth (not to be confused with the man who fell to earth.) Basically a few people trapped in a room for most of the movie discussing a monumental mathematical proof that has huge implications for just about everything and everyone on the planet, and the moral responsibility they have as they are in cahoots with the government through funding. If you have an attention span, love existential and philosophical discussions, or just enjoy movies that make you think then you will love this film as I did. Please help this film get the rating it deserves.

Most of our sci-fi movies and shows use an imaginary world to explore aspects of our present reality like Star Trek (1996, TV), or just as an exciting fantasy, like Star Wars (1977). In print this kind of story is soft sci-fi. Hard sci-fi looks at what could happen in a realistic future after new scientific discoveries, like 2001 (1968). Travelling Salesman is a hard sci-fi story that adds one new discovery to our world and imagines the consequences for the discoverers.In the movie, four mathematicians confront the US government official who has just overseen their successful breakthrough in math that will enable code breaking of every communication code. The four hope that their work will be made public in order to be applied to many important problems, but the spook makes it clear that their work is top secret and there's to be no negotiation.One of the four, Dr. Horton, has found a further extension of the work which would allow automated reasoning with virtually no limit, something akin to strong AI. He hasn't included this in the published work perhaps out of fear that the applications would be too dangerous. Horton demands that the work be made public. His fellow nerds don't back him.Then after an hour of very stimulating thrust and parry, we get a really unfortunate twist ending. You can stop the DVD at 1:10 with 10 minutes left and get a better movie. The spook tells Horton that his whole family will die if he reveals the work. So Horton goes home and reads over the letter from the President. The watermark is an Illuminati pyramid! Realizing... something... he runs a super-virus program that apparently breaks all the computers in the world. The end.I rate the first hour a 10/10 for those like me who love hard science fiction stories and treasure those few that come along as films. Many audiences won't like it at all. It's not rigorous as far as all the math and terminology (I noticed "SCI classified" and "PSPACE" are not used properly) and a few people who might otherwise be fans will hate that. I studied the real math that the story refers to and that probably helped with my interest in its implications. Viewers should be aware that the film's premise is true, that our current codes could in principle be broken by a scientific breakthrough. The script is all about the ideas and has little interest in characters. It's almost a one-act play as far as staging goes. The final twist is a cheap way to wrap things up. In 2013 we've learned from Edward Snowden that the US NSA has done much more to crack codes worldwide in the past decade than we had known. The NSA has a history of hiring about half of US mathematicians. If they thought there was a chance of making a breakthrough like the one in the film, they would indeed keep it a secret. We now know that in the 70s the NSA discovered differential cryptography, an attack on the DES crypto system that was not rediscovered in the open literature for 20 years. In short the breakthrough and cover-up in the film is plausible politically and perhaps mathematically. Those who enjoyed Travelling Salesman should check out Primer (2004). It is a low budget time travel movie with a similar talk-heavy hard sci-fi orientation.Check the Dr Strangelove homage at 13:20!