I'm not sure if you truncated that excerpt on purpose or not, but the sentence that follows it indicates that the author does actually know what the TSP is.

> In particular, Dr Dorigo was interested to learn that ants are good at choosing the shortest possible route between a food source and their nest. This is reminiscent of a classic computational conundrum, the travelling-salesman problem. Given a list of cities and their distances apart, the salesman must find the shortest route needed to visit each city once.