Paper by Erik D. Demaine

Reference:

Erik D. Demaine, Alejandro López-Ortiz, and J. Ian Munro, “On Universally Easy Classes for NP-complete Problems”, in Proceedings of the 12th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2001), Washington, DC, January 7–9, 2001, pages 910–911.

Abstract:

We explore the natural question of whether all NP-complete problems have a common restriction under which they are polynomially solvable. More precisely, we study what languages are universally easy in that their intersection with any NP-complete problem is in P. In particular, we give a polynomial-time algorithm to determine whether a regular language is universally easy. While our approach is language-theoretic, the results bear directly on finding polynomial-time solutions to very broad and useful classes of problems.

Length:

The paper is 2 pages.

Availability:

The paper is available in PostScript (111k) and gzipped PostScript (47k).

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