lecture 17: more approximations
November 10th, 2008We covered material from Chapter 11 of KT, and considered two examples: Firstly, we looked at a simple scheduling problem and showed how to get a 2-approximation using a greedy algorithm. Then, we looked at the Travelling Salesman problem. After showing that in its most general form, no approximation ratio is possible unless P = NP, we showed that if we require that edge weights form a metric, then a heuristic attributed to Christofides enables us to get a 1.5 approximatino.
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