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Problems in need of solutions range from simple personal tasks (e.g. how to turn on an appliance) to complex issues in business and technical fields. The former is an example of simple problem solving (SPS) addressing one issue, whereas the latter is complex problem solving (CPS) with multiple interrelated obstacles. [1]
For example, the problem of factoring "Given a positive integer n, find a nontrivial prime factor of n." is a computational problem that has a solution, as there are many known integer factorization algorithms. A computational problem can be viewed as a set of instances or cases together with a, possibly empty, set of solutions for every ...
Solution of a travelling salesman problem: the black line shows the shortest possible loop that connects every red dot. In the theory of computational complexity, the travelling salesman problem (TSP) asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the ...
Most problems can be formulated in terms of a search space and target in several different ways. For example, for the traveling salesman problem a solution can be a route visiting all cities and the goal is to find the shortest route. But a solution can also be a path, and being a cycle is part of the target.
The most common problem being solved is the 0-1 knapsack problem, which restricts the number of copies of each kind of item to zero or one. Given a set of items numbered from 1 up to , each with a weight and a value , along with a maximum weight capacity ,
However, some problems have distinct optimal solutions; for example, the problem of finding a feasible solution to a system of linear inequalities is a linear programming problem in which the objective function is the zero function (i.e., the constant function taking the value zero everywhere).
Clearly, a #P problem must be at least as hard as the corresponding NP problem, since a count of solutions immediately tells if at least one solution exists, if the count is greater than zero. Surprisingly, some #P problems that are believed to be difficult correspond to easy (for example linear-time) P problems. [18]
The problem for graphs is NP-complete if the edge lengths are assumed integers. The problem for points on the plane is NP-complete with the discretized Euclidean metric and rectilinear metric. The problem is known to be NP-hard with the (non-discretized) Euclidean metric. [3]: ND22, ND23