4 ms·

It wasn't framed as "find an approximate/heuristic solution".

• dllthomas 4y ago
  You can offer. Nothing about it being NP should prevent your implementing an exact solution, though. It'll be slow as balls on (at least) some inputs, and you should surface that, but maybe they only need something that works for N<5 or something. That's different than it being undecidable, in which case you have to insist on providing something other than an exact algorithm that handles every input.
  • nephanth 4y ago
    For the short story. A few years ago I was sitting a CS exam that was 3 hours of coding and then a defense where you explained what you have done on the board. You had to compute a graph from a set of points (i think it was knn, not sure) and do stuff on it. At some point of the defense, this happened Me: I skipped this question. Examinator: why? Me: If I compute it using the graph structure, it reduces to max-clique, which is np-complete. I looked for a solution using the point dara but didn't find it Examinator: can you write an algorithm for max-clique on the board? Me: here. This is exponential time Examinator: it's worst case exponential time. But in this case it would have worked, you just had to try it Me: urgh Now I've learned my lesson: np-complete doesn't mean impossible
• mateo411 4y ago
  That's fine. Just provide and exponential runtime algorithm and you are good.