NP completeness

In computational complexity theory, an NP-complete decision problem is one belonging to both the NP and the NP-hard complexity classes. In this context, NP stands for "nondeterministic polynomial time". The set of NP-complete problems is often denoted by NP-C or NPC.

Although any given solution to an NP-complete problem can be verified quickly (in polynomial time), there is no known efficient way to locate a solution in the first place; indeed, the most notable characteristic of NP-complete problems is that no fast solution to them is known. That is, the time required to solve the problem using any currently known algorithm increases very quickly as the size of the problem grows. As a consequence, determining whether it is possible to solve these problems quickly, called the P versus NP problem, is one of the principal unsolved problems in computer science today.

While a method for computing the solutions to NP-complete problems using a reasonable amount of time remains undiscovered, computer scientists and programmers still frequently encounter NP-complete problems. NP-complete problems are often addressed by using heuristic methods and approximation algorithms.

NP-complete problems are in NP, the set of all decision problems whose solutions can be verified in polynomial time; NP may be equivalently defined as the set of decision problems that can be solved in polynomial time on a non-deterministic Turing machine. A problem p in NP is NP-complete if every other problem in NP can be transformed (or reduced) into p in polynomial time.

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