P, Np, and Np-Completeness: The Basics of Computational Complexity

Goldreich, Oded

ISBN 10: 0521122546 / ISBN 13: 9780521122542

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2010

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9780521122542

Bibliographic Details

• Title: P, Np, and Np-Completeness: The Basics of Computational Complexity
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521122546
• ISBN 13: 9780521122542
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The focus of this book is the P-versus-NP Question and the theory of NP-completeness. It also provides adequate preliminaries regarding computational problems and computational models. The P-versus-NP Question asks whether or not finding solutions is harder than checking the correctness of solutions. An alternative formulation asks whether or not discovering proofs is harder than verifying their correctness. It is widely believed that the answer to these equivalent formulations is positive, and this is captured by saying that P is different from NP. Although the P-versus-NP Question remains unresolved, the theory of NP-completeness offers evidence for the intractability of specific problems in NP by showing that they are universal for the entire class. Amazingly enough, NP-complete problems exist, and furthermore hundreds of natural computational problems arising in many different areas of mathematics and science are NP-complete.

About the Author

Oded Goldreich is a Professor of Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science and an incumbent of the Meyer W. Weisgal Professorial Chair. He is an editor for the SIAM Journal on Computing, the Journal of Cryptology, and Computational Complexity and previously authored the books Modern Cryptography, Probabilistic Proofs and Pseudorandomness, the two-volume work Foundations of Cryptography, and Computational Complexity: A Conceptual Perspective.