2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
|
|
|
NP-
|
|
|
|
|
|
2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
|
|
|
/NP/ , pref. Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or
|
|
|
|
|
quality of difficulty; the connotation is often more so than it should be.
|
|
|
|
|
This is generalized from the computer-science terms NP-hard and NP-complete
|
|
|
|
|
; NP-complete problems all seem to be very hard, but so far no one has found
|
|
|
|
|
a proof that they are. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial
|
|
|
|
|
problems, those that can be completed by a nondeterministic Turing machine
|
|
|
|
|
in an amount of time that is a polynomial function of the size of the input;
|
|
|
|
|
a solution for one NP-complete problem would solve all the others. Coding a
|
|
|
|
|
BitBlt implementation to perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying.
|
|
|
|
|
Note, however, that strictly speaking this usage is misleading; there are
|
|
|
|
|
plenty of easy problems in class NP. NP-complete problems are hard not
|
|
|
|
|
because they are in class NP, but because they are the hardest problems in
|
|
|
|
|
class NP.
|
|
|
|
|
|
