Lecture 13: P and NP. “Trust, but verify!”
October 8th, 2008Material for this lecture is drawn from Chapter 8 of the textbook, and archives of Ronald Reagan’s speeches on the Cold War.
Thus far we’ve been looking at techniques for designing efficient algorithms for problems. We’ll now stare failure in the face, and try to understand when we might fail at doing this, and why. In order to do so, we’ll reason about entire classes of problems at a time, rather than about a single problem. The central question of study is the (in)famous question: Is P = NP ?
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