By adding chaotic noise to each neuron of the discrete-time continuous-output Hopfield neural network (HNN) and gradually reducing the noise, a chaotic neural network is proposed so that it is initially chaotic but eventually convergent, and, thus, has richer and more flexible dynamics compared to the HNN. The proposed network is applied to the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and that results are highly satisfactory. That is, the transient chaos enables the network to escape from local energy minima and to find global minima in 100% of the simulations for four-city and ten-city TSPs, as well as near-optimal solutions in most of runs for a 48-city TSP.