The Seven Bridges of Königsberg/Section 3

The particular problem of the seven bridges of Königsberg could be solved by carefully tabulating all possible paths, thereby ascertaining by inspection which of them, if any, met the requirement. This method of solution, however, is too tedious and too difficult because of the large number of possible combinations, and in other problems where many more bridges are involved it could not be used at all. When the analysis is undertaken in the manner just described it yields a great many details that are irrelevant to the problem; undoubtedly this is the reason the method is so onerous. Hence I discarded it and searched for another more restricted in its scope; namely, a method which would show only whether a journey satisfying the prescribed condition could in the first instance be discovered; such an approach, I believed, would be much simpler.