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I'm not an expert on this, just a linguist who happens to code a lot, but there is some serious work on the complexity of frequency ordering. The algorithms proposed by R. Rivest (1976, Communications of the ACM) produce near-optimal frequency orders online, so if you can settle for "near optimal" then the problem is hardly traveling salesman as this author claims.

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Even with a traveling salesman problem you can get "near-optimal" results with an algorithm that has a reasonable run time. It's still important to note that you have such a problem though, as the fact that you're settling for "near optimal" needs to be understood.

You can actually find the global optimal solution for surprisingly large real world instances. They do tens of thousands of cities.

Lots of interesting stuff here. The Concorde solver is probably the state of the art. http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/concorde/index.html

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