Extracting Dynamical Equations from Experimental Data is NP Hard

Extracting dynamical equations from experimental data is NP hard.

The behavior of any physical system is governed by its underlying dynamical equations. Much of physics is concerned with discovering these dynamical equations and understanding their consequences. In this Letter, we show that, remarkably, identifying the underlying dynamical equation from any amount of experimental data, however precise, is a provably computationally hard problem (it is NP hard...

Extracting Minimum Length Document Type Definitions Is NP-Hard

Trainyard is NP-hard

Recently, due to the widespread diffusion of smart-phones, mobile puzzle games have experienced a huge increase in their popularity. A successful puzzle has to be both captivating and challenging, and it has been suggested that this features are somehow related to their computational complexity [5]. Indeed, many puzzle games – such as Mah-Jongg, Sokoban, Candy Crush, and 2048, to name a few – a...

Candy Crush is NP-hard

We prove that playing Candy Crush to achieve a given score in a fixed number of swaps is NP-hard.

Protein design is NP-hard.

Biologists working in the area of computational protein design have never doubted the seriousness of the algorithmic challenges that face them in attempting in silico sequence selection. It turns out that in the language of the computer science community, this discrete optimization problem is NP-hard. The purpose of this paper is to explain the context of this observation, to provide a simple i...