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Are Stable Instances Easy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

YONATAN BILU
Affiliation:
Mobileye Vision Technologies Ltd, 13 Hartom Street, PO Box 45157, Jerusalem, 91450Israel (e-mail: yonatan.bilu@mobileye.com)
NATHAN LINIAL
Affiliation:
Institute of Computer Science, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel (e-mail: nati@cs.huji.ac.il)

Abstract

We introduce the notion of a stable instance for a discrete optimization problem, and argue that in many practical situations only sufficiently stable instances are of interest. The question then arises whether stable instances of NP-hard problems are easier to solve, and in particular, whether there exist algorithms that solve in polynomial time all sufficiently stable instances of some NP-hard problem. The paper focuses on the Max-Cut problem, for which we show that this is indeed the case.

Type
Paper
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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