PvNP Earns a 21 Proof of Usefulness Score by Building an Interactive TSP Solver and Visualizer

Today, we are interviewing Yumna Sohail, the creator of PvNP, an early-stage educational project aimed at making complex routing problems accessible. The tool visualizes the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) through animation, helping users grasp combinatorial optimization without getting lost in abstract formulas.

What does PvNP do? And why is now the time for it to exist?

This is a TSP solver that runs on a regular laptop & works for both fully and partially connected networks. The product not only computes the optimal route but also visualizes the traversal through an animation. Currently, it supports up to 30 nodes. Now’s a good time for PvNP to exist because the demand for interactive and tangible educational tech is growing, making it crucial to lower the barrier to understanding complex computer science problems for students before scaling up to practical routing and logistics applications.

What is your traction to date? How many people does PvNP reach?

~3 (private beta — friends reviewing and testing the MVP)

Pre-launch MVP currently in private validation with early testers; public educational rollout planned.

Who does your PvNP serve? What’s exciting about your users and customers?

Its initial focus is universities and educational institutions where it can be used as a tool for teaching search and optimization problems. The next milestone is to scale the solver’s capabilities and customize it for small to mid-sized delivery and logistics companies.

What technologies were used in the making of PvNP? And why did you choose ones most essential to your techstack?

While the specifics of the core tech stack remain straightforward, PvNP leverages reliable web-based hosting by deploying its minimum viable product on Render. This ensures the solver runs efficiently on regular laptops while providing smooth animations to visually unpack complex network traversals.

What is traction to date for PvNP? Around the web, who’s been noticing?

Currently, PvNP is a web-based MVP in private validation that has been successfully demoed to a handful of early users who provided positive feedback on its usability. Over the next few months, the focus will shift towards targeted outreach, aiming to secure 20-50 student users through classroom pilots and coursework integration by university instructors.

What excites you about this PvNP's potential usefulness?

What excites me most is making a classic NP-hard problem tangible and interactive for learners. Instead of abstract formulas, students can experiment with real graphs, constraints, and search behavior and immediately see how optimal solutions emerge. This lowers the barrier to understanding combinatorial optimization while also creating a foundation that can scale into practical routing and logistics applications as the solver grows.