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Informally, an NP-complete problem is an NP problem that is at least as "tough" as any other problem in NP. NP-hard problems are those at least as hard as NP problems; i.e., all NP problems can be reduced (in polynomial time) to them. NP-hard problems need not be in NP; i.e., they need not have solutions verifiable in polynomial time.
A simple example of an NP-hard problem is the subset sum problem. Informally, if H is NP-hard, then it is at least as difficult to solve as the problems in NP. However, the opposite direction is not true: some problems are undecidable, and therefore even more difficult to solve than all problems in NP, but they are probably not NP-hard (unless ...
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 decision version of set covering is NP-complete. It is one of Karp's 21 NP-complete problems shown to be NP-complete in 1972. The optimization/search version of set cover is NP-hard. [1] It is a problem "whose study has led to the development of fundamental techniques for the entire field" of approximation algorithms. [2]
Euler diagram for P, NP, NP-complete, and NP-hard set of problems. 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.
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 ...
Quadratic programming (NP-hard in some cases, P if convex) Subset sum problem [3]: SP13 Variations on the Traveling salesman problem. 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.
A problem is NP-complete if it is both in NP and NP-hard. The NP-complete problems represent the hardest problems in NP. If some NP-complete problem has a polynomial time algorithm, all problems in NP do. The set of NP-complete problems is often denoted by NP-C or NPC.