3 ms·
If I understand this correctly as I mostly read this just today, then Cook reductions - which is the name for polynomial Turing reductions - are the more genera
by danbruc 4y ago
If I understand this correctly as I mostly read this just today, then Cook reductions - which is the name for polynomial Turing reductions - are the more general class whereas Karp reductions - which are polynomial many-one reductions - are a more restricted class which - to a first approximation - only allows one oracle query and must return the result unmodified.
So if I am concerned with what can be done in polynomial time, then why would I limit myself to Karp reductions? If I want to finely separate classes of problems, then Karp reductions are probably better suited as the reduction builds a much more direct link between the two problems.
That is (nearly) correct under Cook reductions but not Karp reductions.
It is however still not clear to me why this is not true under Karp reductions, because there are not necessarily Karp reductions for some problems that have Cook reductions? If so, are there two different NP-complete classes, one per reduction?
- JohnKemeny 4y ago> So if I am concerned with what can be done in polynomial time, then why would I limit myself to Karp reductions? Because under Karp, SAT and UNSAT are widely different problems whereas under Cook, they're not. You can verify SAT in polynomial time. You can not do that for UNSAT.