The P=NP Question and Gödel’s Lost Letter Volume 85 || An Approach To P=NP

✍ Scribed by Lipton, Richard J.

• Book ID: 111875946
• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 489 KB
• Edition: 2010
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 1441971556
• DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-7155-5_12

✦ Synopsis

? DoesP=NP. In just ?ve symbols Dick Karp –in 1972–captured one of the deepest and most important questions of all time. When he ?rst wrote his famous paper, I think it’s fair to say he did not know the depth and importance of his question. Now over three decades later, we know P=NP is central to our understanding of compu- tion, it is a very hard problem, and its resolution will have potentially tremendous consequences. This book is a collection of some of the most popular posts from my blog— Godel ¨ Lost Letter andP=NP—which I started in early 2009. The main thrust of the blog, especially when I started, was to explore various aspects of computational complexity around the famousP=NP question. As I published posts I branched out and covered additional material, sometimes a timely event, sometimes a fun idea, sometimes a new result, and sometimes an old result. I have always tried to make the posts readable by a wide audience, and I believe I have succeeded in doing this.