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The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. Informally, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be quickly solved. Here, quickly means an algorithm that solves the task and runs in polynomial time exists, meaning the task completion time varies as a polynomial ...
The concept of NP-completeness was introduced in 1971 (see Cook–Levin theorem ), though the term NP-complete was introduced later. At the 1971 STOC conference, there was a fierce debate between the computer scientists about whether NP-complete problems could be solved in polynomial time on a deterministic Turing machine.
If P and NP are different, then there exist decision problems in the region of NP that fall between P and the NP-complete problems. (If P and NP are the same class, then NP-intermediate problems do not exist because in this case every NP-complete problem would fall in P, and by definition, every problem in NP can be reduced to an NP-complete ...
Under the assumption that P ≠ NP, the existence of problems within NP but outside both P and NP-complete was established by Ladner. [ 1] In computational complexity theory, NP ( nondeterministic polynomial time) is a complexity class used to classify decision problems. NP is the set of decision problems for which the problem instances, where ...
In theoretical computer science and mathematics, computational complexity theory focuses on classifying computational problems according to their resource usage, and explores the relationships between these classifications. A computational problem is a task solved by a computer. A computation problem is solvable by mechanical application of ...
While there might seem to be an obvious difference between the class of problems that are efficiently solvable and the class of problems whose solutions are merely efficiently checkable, P and NP are actually at the center of one of the most famous unsolved problems in computer science: the P versus NP problem.
P (complexity) In computational complexity theory, P, also known as PTIME or DTIME ( nO (1) ), is a fundamental complexity class. It contains all decision problems that can be solved by a deterministic Turing machine using a polynomial amount of computation time, or polynomial time . Cobham's thesis holds that P is the class of computational ...
There is an optimization version of the partition problem, which is to partition the multiset S into two subsets S 1, S 2 such that the difference between the sum of elements in S 1 and the sum of elements in S 2 is minimized. The optimization version is NP-hard, but can be solved efficiently in practice. [4]