How to solve the travelling salesman problem using linear least squares?

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Do there exist any algorithms only using linear least squares to try and solve the travelling salesman problem? It somehow seems like such a hard problem it would not be possible to do...

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No, because assuming $P \neq NP$, TSP is not poly-time reducible to linear regression, because the former is $NP-HARD$ and the latter is in $P$.

If you drop the poly-time constraint, then you can make the reduction do all the work without needing to use the regression. In other words, you can make all the $y$ coordinates the same, encoding the solution to the problem.