Goals

This week we arrive at the most famous and foundational open problem in Computer Science (and, arguably, in all of Mathematics, and more questionably, perhaps of all human creative endeavor): is it substantially easier to verify the solution to a (certain very broad and common type of) problem, than it is to find that solution? (stated more formally in computer science as “P = NP?".

The main goals for Week 11 are to:

Understand how to talk about the hardness (“difficulty”) of computing functions.
Learn about a few examples of problems that appear to have surprisingly different difficulties.
Be able to talk about the tractability of problems, and understand what computer scientists categorize problems as tractable and intractable the way we do.
Understand precisely the definition of the complexity class NP, and two different ways of defining it.
Be able to prove a problem is in class NP.
Understand the P=NP question and its significance.
See how we might be able to make progress on determining if P=NP, and understand the Cook-Levin Theorem and the main idea behind its proof.

Schedule

Following the Election Day adjustments, the “Tuesday” cohorts are now the last ones in the schedule, and the week starts with the “Wednesday” cohorts.

Day	"Wednesday" Cohort	"Thursday" Cohort	"Friday" Cohort	"Sunday" Cohort	"Monday" Cohort	"Tuesday" Cohort
Thu 5 Nov	Preparation	(Week 10)	(Week 10)	(Week 10)	(Week 10)	(Week 10)
Fri 6 Nov	Preparation	Preparation	(Week 10)	(Week 10)	(Week 10)	(Week 10)
Sat/Sun 7/8 Nov	Preparation	Preparation	Preparation	(Week 10)	(Week 10)	(Week 10)
Mon 9 Nov	Cohort Meeting	Preparation	Preparation	Preparation	(Week 10)	(Week 10)
Tue 10 Nov	Preparation	Cohort Meeting	Preparation	Preparation	Preparation	(Week 10)
Wed 11 Nov	Assessed Cohort Meeting	Preparation	Cohort Meeting	Preparation	Preparation	Preparation
Thu 12 Nov	Write-up Due	Assessed Cohort Meeting	Preparation	Cohort Meeting	Preparation	Preparation
Fri 13 Nov	Week 12	Write-up Due	Assessed Cohort Meeting	Preparation	Cohort Meeting	Preparation
Sat/Sun 14/15 Nov	Week 12	Week 12	Write-up Due	Assessed Cohort Meeting	Preparation	Cohort Meeting
Mon 16 Nov	Week 12	Week 12	Week 12	Write-up Due	Assessed Cohort Meeting	Preparation
Tue 17 Nov	Week 12	Week 12	Week 12	Week 12	Write-up Due	Assessed Cohort Meeting
Wed 18 Nov	Week 12	Week 12	Week 12	Week 12	Week 12	Write-up Due

Cohort Problems

These are the problems you should discuss in your Cohort Meeting, and everyone in your cohort should be prepared to present and discuss solutions to at the Assessed Cohort Meeting:

Cohort Problems for Week 11 [PDF]

The problems are posted here and we think its a good idea to look at them early, but you’re not expected to be able to solve them until after doing the readings and watching the videos below.

After the Assessed Cohort Meeting, your Cohort Leader will select one problem that your cohort needs to write-up and submit. The write-up is due by 11:59pm on the day after your assessed cohort meeting (see the schedule above).

Problem Set 11 Template [zip].

Reading

This week’s content is covered in several chapters in the TCS book. This is a lot of reading material, but you should consider it all “optional” this week - you are not expected to read these in detail, but should find the textbook a useful complement to the lecture content to have an alternate presenation of the materials and a refernce for some of the technical details that we do not cover in depth in the lectures.

Chapter 12: Efficient computation: An informal introduction [PDF]

Chapter 13: Modeling running time [PDF]

Chapter 14: Polynomial-time reducations [PDF]

Chapter 15: NP, NP completeness, and the Cook-Levin Theorem [PDF]

Chapter 16: What if P equals NP? [PDF]

Videos

The videos for this week are longer than in previous weeks (so please don’t wait to get started on them!), but include quite a bit of review material and are designed to get to a good understanding of the P=NP question.

You can play all the videos using this playlist, but don’t forget to take breaks: Week 11 Playlist

These videos are edited from these cs3102 classes (we don’t generally recommend watching the unedited versions, but they are available if you want to):