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Cook's Theorem On NP-completeness SATISFIABILITY Is NP-complete

This document discusses Cook's theorem on NP-completeness and the SATISFIABILITY problem. It provides an example SATISFIABILITY problem about organizing a party with guest preferences that must be satisfied. It explains that checking a proposed solution can be done in polynomial time, while generating a solution requires exponential time. The theorem shows that if a polynomial solution can be found for SATISFIABILITY, then P would equal NP and all NP problems could be solved quickly.

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Aditya Wadwankar
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59 views1 page

Cook's Theorem On NP-completeness SATISFIABILITY Is NP-complete

This document discusses Cook's theorem on NP-completeness and the SATISFIABILITY problem. It provides an example SATISFIABILITY problem about organizing a party with guest preferences that must be satisfied. It explains that checking a proposed solution can be done in polynomial time, while generating a solution requires exponential time. The theorem shows that if a polynomial solution can be found for SATISFIABILITY, then P would equal NP and all NP problems could be solved quickly.

Uploaded by

Aditya Wadwankar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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THEOREM OF THE DAY

Cook’s Theorem on NP-completeness SATISFIABILITY is NP-complete.


SATISFIABILITY: a group of people are organ-
ising a party; is there a guest list which satisfies
at least one of each person’s stated preferences?
This is an example of a decision problem: a sim-
plified theoretical version which just requires a
Yes-No answer.

TIMING CONSIDERATIONS
Horizontal axis: n=number of preferences about party guests;
Vertical axis: time, measured in, say, seconds, required to decide
if there is a satisfying guest list.
Compare the polynomial n5 -time solution to the exponential-
time 2n one, as n increases beyond 20. Exponential-time is always
infinitely slower than polynomial-time as problem size becomes
infinitely large.

NONDETERMINISTIC POLYNOMIAL-TIME (NP)


The class of apparently hard problems for which a random
solution to the decision problem version can be written
down and checked in polynomial time is very large. Thus,
it appears much easier to check a candidate guest list, e.g.
the one on the right, than to generate a correct one.

The only known solutions to SATISFIABILITY essentially involve checking every possible guest list and this takes exponential time: 2n steps. The problem
is generally believed to lie outside the class P of decision problems with a quick (Polynomial) solution. This remains true even if everybody has exactly three
preferences (so-called 3-Satisfiability). But the problem belongs to NP and this property, of admitting polynomially checkable candidates, turns out to be
fundamental (unlike the distinction between decision problems and optimisation problems — find an actual guest list! — which is a theoretical convenience).
The theorem appears to refer only to a very specific problem but relates to one of the most famous open questions in math-
ematics, referred to as P=NP? Cook’s 1971 theorem says that if we can find a polynomial algorithm for SATISFIABILITY
then the classes P and NP are identical, and we can solve all NP problems in polynomial time, no matter how different from
SATISFIABILITY they might appear to be. Leonid Levin published essentially the same result in 1973 and this theorem is
also known as the Cook-Levin Theorem.
Web link: rjlipton.wordpress.com/about/: if P=NP? is settled you will read about it here first ... unless you are the one winning the
$1 million: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium Prize Problems!
Further reading: Computers and Intractability by M.R. Garey and D.S. Johnson, W.H.Freeman & Co Ltd, 1979.
Created by Robin Whitty for www.theoremoftheday.org

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