Hopfield network based approximation engine for NP complete problems

Abstract

NP Complete problems belong to a computational class of problems that have no known polynomial time solutions. Many popular and practically useful problems in the field of optimization and graph theory which have real life application are known to be NP Complete and solving them exactly is intractable. The existing problem with these is that there is no known efficient way to locate a solution in the first place, the most notable characteristic of NP-complete problems is that no fast solution to them is known. However approximate solutions can be obtained in polynomial time. Hopfield networks are one of the ways to obtain approximate solution to the problems in polynomial time. Exploiting the reducibility property and the capability of Hopfield Networks to provide approximate solutions in polynomial time we propose a Hopfield Network based approximation engine to solve these NP complete problems.