Lecture 2: NP-Completeness

• Garey and Johnson ch. 2, 3
• Gupta and Nau on a proof of NPC for blocks-world: the long version from AAAI 1991, or the short version (or uncompressed long or short version) from Artificial Intelligence 1992.

Homework 1 is assigned.

Notes

• Order analysis and computational complexity.
• Garey and Johnson's problem description format.
  • notation
  • problems and instances
• P, NP, and beyond.
• Decision vs. optimization problems.
• Coproblems.
• SAT is NP complete.
• Many-one reductions.
• Why we keep trying anyhow.
• Blocks-world