The important task of generating the minimum number of sequential triangle strips (tristrips) for a given triangulated surface model is motived by applications in computer graphics. This hard combinatorial optimization problem is reduced to the minimum energy problem in Hopfield nets by a linear-size construction. The Hopfield network powered by simulated annealing (i.e. Boltzmann machine) which is implemented in a program HTGEN can be used for computing the semi-optimal stripifications. Practical experiments confirm that one can obtain much better results using HTGEN than by a leading stripification program FTSG although the running time of simulated annealing grows rapidly near the global optimum.