NP-Completeness

• NP-completeness is a form of bad news!

– Evidence that many important problems can not be
solved quickly.
• Knowing that they are hard lets you stop beating
your head against a wall trying to solve them…
– Use a heuristic: come up with a method for solving a
reasonable fraction of the common cases.
– Solve approximately: come up with a solution that
you can prove that is close to right.
– Use an exponential time solution: if you really have
to solve the problem exactly and stop worrying about
finding a better solution.
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 Example of Unsolvable Problem
• Halting problem is the problem of determining, from a
description of an arbitrary computer program and an
input, whether the program will finish running, or
continue to run forever.
• Turing discovered in the 1930’s that there are problems
unsolvable by any algorithm.
• The most famous of them is the halting problem
num ← 1
– Given an arbitrary algorithm REPEAT UNTIL (num = 0) {
DISPLAY(num) num ← num + 1
and its input, will that algorithm }

eventually halt, or will it continue

forever in an “infinite loop?”
– Alan Turing proved in 1936

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Examples of Intractable Problems

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 Class of “P” Problems
• Definition: The Class P
– P is the class of decision problems that are polynomial bounded.
– There exist a deterministic algorithm

• Polynomial-time algorithms
– Worst-case running time is O(nk), for some constant k
• Examples of polynomial time:
– O(n2), O(n3), O(1), O(n lg n)

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 Class of “NP” Problems
• Definition: The Class NP
– NP is the class of decision problems for which there is a
polynomial bounded non-deterministic algorithm.
– The name “NP” comes from “Non-deterministic” polynomial
bounded
– There exist a non-deterministic algorithm
– P NP ?
• Examples of non-polynomial time:
– O(2n), O(nn), O(n!)
is TSP ∊ NP ?
Guess a tour, check every city visited exactly once
check return to start & total distance <B
all done in O(n) so TSP ∊ NP
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 3SAT -Problem
o Goal of Verification algorithm is to verify a yes answer to decision
problem input
o The inputs to verification algorithm are the original input and a
certificate
o Other problems like HAMILTONIAN CYCLE are known to have
polynomial bound algorithms but given a Hamiltonian cycle, It is easy to
verify that the cycle is indeed Hamiltonian in polynomial time.
o A verification algorithm , takes a problem instance x and verifies it, if
there exist a certificate y such that the answer for x with certificate y is
“yes”

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 A non-deterministic Algorithms

Nondeterministic algorithm = two stage procedure:

1) Non-deterministic (“guessing”) stage:
generate randomly an arbitrary string that can be
thought of as a candidate solution (“certificate”)

2) Deterministic (“verification”) stage:

take the certificate and the instance to the problem and
returns YES if the certificate represents a solution

NP algorithms (Nondeterministic polynomial)

verification stage is polynomial
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 P and NP

Summary:
• P solved in Polynomial time
• NP problem for which a solution can be verified in
polynomial time
• Unknown whether P=NP
• Hamiltonian-cycle problem is in NP
– Cannot solve in polynomial time
– Easy to verify solution in polynomial time

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 Is P = NP?
• Any problem in P is also in NP: P

P  NP NP

• The big (and open question) is whether NP  P

or P = NP
– i.e., if it is always easy to check a solution, should it
also be easy to find a solution?

• Most computer scientists believe that this is false

but we do not have a proof …
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 NP-Completeness
• By S. Cook and R Karp in 1970
P NP-complete
• It belief P ≠ NP so there is NP-Complete

• All problem in NP have same level of NP

difficulty

• NP-complete problems are defined as the hardest problems in NP

– If any one NP-Complete problem can be solved in polynomial time, Then every
NP-Complete problem can be solved in polynomial time

– If problem Q’  ex + f = 0 has solution

– Then problem Q (a x^2 + b x + c = 0) can be solved by transforming into Q’

– An instance of Q can be transformed.

• Most practical problems turn out to be either P or NP-complete.

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 Reductions
• Reduction is a way of saying that one problem is
“easier” than another.
• We say that problem A is easier than problem B,
(i.e., we write “A  B”)
if we can solve A using the algorithm that solves B.
• Idea: transform the inputs of A to inputs of B

yes
  yes
f Problem B no
no
Problem A
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 Polynomial Reductions

• Given two problems A, B, we say that A is

polynomially reducible to B (A p B) if:

1. There exists a function f that converts the input of A

to inputs of B in polynomial time

2. A(i) = YES  B(f(i)) = YES

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 NP-Completeness
• A problem B is NP-complete if:
P NP-complete
(1) B  NP
NP
(2) A p B for all A  NP

• If B satisfies only property (2) we say that B is NP-hard

• No polynomial time algorithm has been discovered for an

NP-Complete problem

• No one has ever proven that no polynomial time

algorithm can exist for any NP-Complete problem

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 Implications of Reduction

yes
  yes
f Problem B no
no
Problem A

- If A p B and B  P, then A  P
- if A p B and A  P, then B  P

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 Proving Polynomial Time

yes
  Polynomial time
yes
f
algorithm to decide B no
no

Polynomial time algorithm to decide A

1. Use a polynomial time reduction algorithm to

transform A into B
2. Run a known polynomial time algorithm for B
3. Use the answer for B as the answer for A

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 3SAT -Problem
Problem: Given Boolean formula of the form

( x1 x3 x6 ) ( x2 x3 x7)
Can you set the variables x1,x2,…..  { True, False}
Such that formula = T
------------------------
Guess : x1= True or False
(certification)
x2= True or False
x3= True or False
…………………………………….
Check formula : Return either True(Yes) or False(No) (verification)
{by using the value guessed}
o Goal of Verification algorithm is to verify a yes answer to decision problem input
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o The inputs to verification algorithm are the original input and a certificate
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