ENGLISH

Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness

By M. R. Garey , D. S. Johnson

Book information

Publisher
W. H. Freeman
Year
1979
ISBN
0716710455, 9780716710455
LCC
QA76.6 .G35
Open Library ID
OL18435202M
Language
english
Format
DJVU
Filesize
3 MB (2851849 bytes)
Series
Series of Books in the Mathematical Sciences
Edition
First Edition
Pages
347\347
Topic
Computers
DPI
300
Time added
2011-01-23 12:00:00

Description

This book's introduction features a humorous story of a man with a line of people behind him, who explains to his boss, "I can't find an efficient algorithm, but neither can all these famous people." This man illustrates an important quality of a class of problems, namely, the NP-complete problems: if you can prove that a problem is in this class, then it has no known polynomial-time solution that is guaranteed to work in general. This quality implies that the problem is difficult to deal with in practice. The focus of this book is to teach the reader how to identify, deal with, and understand the essence of NP-complete problems; Computers and Intractability does all of those things effectively. In a readable yet mathematically rigorous manner, the book covers topics such as how to prove that a given problem is NP-complete and how to cope with NP-complete problems. (There is even a chapter on advanced topics, with numerous references.) Computers and Intractability also contains a list of more than 300 problems--most of which are known to be NP-complete--with comments and references.

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