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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 ...
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 ...
Euler diagram for P, NP, NP-complete, and NP-hard set of problems (excluding the empty language and its complement, which belong to P but are not NP-complete) Main article: P versus NP problem The question is whether or not, for all problems for which an algorithm can verify a given solution quickly (that is, in polynomial time ), an algorithm ...
The problem has been shown to be NP-hard (more precisely, it is complete for the complexity class FP NP; see function problem), and the decision problem version ("given the costs and a number x, decide whether there is a round-trip route cheaper than x") is NP-complete. The bottleneck travelling salesman problem is also NP-hard.
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.
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 ...
Geometric complexity theory (GCT), is a research program in computational complexity theory proposed by Ketan Mulmuley and Milind Sohoni. The goal of the program is to answer the most famous open problem in computer science – whether P = NP – by showing that the complexity class P is not equal to the complexity class NP .
P is a subset of RP, which is a subset of NP. Similarly, P is a subset of co-RP which is a subset of co-NP. It is not known whether these inclusions are strict. However, if the commonly believed conjecture P = BPP is true, then RP, co-RP, and P collapse (are all equal). Assuming in addition that P ≠ NP, this then implies that RP is strictly ...