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