Paper by Erik D. Demaine

Reference:

Erik D. Demaine, Alejandro López-Ortiz, and J. Ian Munro, “On Universally Easy Classes for NP-complete Problems”, Theoretical Computer Science, volume 304, number 1–3, July 2003, pages 471–476.

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 (universally polynomial) or at least no longer NP-complete (universally simplifying). 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.

Comments:

This paper is also available from ScienceDirect.

Length:

The paper is 6 pages.

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SODA2001c (On Universally Easy Classes for NP-complete Problems)