On inefficient special cases of NP-complete problems

On Unapproximable Versions of NP-Complete Problems

We prove that all of Karp’s 21 original NP-complete problems have a version that is hard to approximate. These versions are obtained from the original problems by adding essentially the same simple constraint. We further show that these problems are absurdly hard to approximate. In fact, no polynomial-time algorithm can even approximate log(k) of the magnitude of these problems to within any co...

A Probabilistic Attack on NP-complete Problems

Using the probability theory-based approach, this paper reveals the equivalence of an arbitrary NPcomplete problem to a problem of checking whether a level set of a specifically constructed harmonic cost function (with all diagonal entries of its Hessian matrix equal to zero) intersects with a unit hypercube in many-dimensional Euclidean space. This connection suggests the possibility that meth...

Complete Problems for Monotone NP

We show that the problem of deciding whether a digraph has a Hamiltonian path between two specified vertices and the problem of deciding whether a given graph has a cubic subgraph are complete for monotone NP via monotone projection translations. We also show that the problem of deciding whether a uniquely partially orderable (resp. comparability) graph has a cubic subgraph is complete for NP v...

NP-Complete Stable Matching Problems

This paper concerns the complexity analysis of the roommate problem and intern assignment problem with couples. These are two special cases of the matching problems known as stable matching. The roommate problem is that of assigning a set of people to rooms of exactly two occupants in accordance with the preferences of the members of the set. The intern assignment problem with couples is that o...

Lecture 16: NP-complete Problems