NP-Hard Problems

Abstract

A generally-accepted minimum requirement for an algorithm to be considered ‘efficient’ is that its running time is polynomial: O(nc) for some constant c, where n is the size of the input.1 Researchers recognized early on that not all problems can be solved this quickly, but we had a hard time figuring out exactly which ones could and which ones couldn’t. there are several so-called NP-hard problems, which most people believe cannot be solved in polynomial time, even though nobody can prove a super-polynomial lower bound. Circuit satisfiability is a good example of a problem that we don’t know how to solve in polynomial time. In this problem, the input is a boolean circuit: a collection of AND, OR, and NOT gates connected by wires. We will assume that there are no loops in the circuit (so no delay lines or flip-flops). The input to the circuit is a set of m boolean (TRUE/FALSE) values x1, . . . , xm. The output is a single boolean value. Given specific input values, we can calculate the output of the circuit in polynomial (actually, linear) time using depth-first-search, since we can compute the output of a k-input gate in O(k) time. The circuit satisfiability problem asks, given a circuit, whether there is an input that makes the circuit output TRUE, or conversely, whether the circuit always outputs FALSE. Nobody knows how to solve this problem faster than just trying all 2m possible inputs to the circuit, but this requires exponential time. On the other hand, nobody has ever proved that this is the best we can do; maybe there’s a clever algorithm that nobody has discovered yet!