Holy crap! Is there a link to the algorithm? It sounds like he arranges vertexes into sets composed of their closest neighbors and then performance a sort of merge sort to get a circuit.
Here's a more thorough account of the story.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.2326-1951.1980....
Also. They guy invented an algorithm for linear programming. That is _not_ the travelling salesman problem. For that, solutions need to be integer.
there is now:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9373231 (readable online)
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_programming
"The linear-programming problem was first shown to be solvable in polynomial time by Leonid Khachiyan in 1979, but a larger theoretical and practical breakthrough in the field came in 1984 when Narendra Karmarkar introduced a new interior-point method for solving linear-programming problems."