Search code examples
language-agnosticnp-complete

Have you ever had a business requirement that turned out to be an NP-Complete problem?


NP-completeness seems to me like one of those things that's mostly just theoretical and not really something you'd run into in a normal work environment.

So I'm kind of curious if anyone's ever run into a problem at their job that turned out to be NP-complete, and that the design needed to be changed to accommodate for it?


Solution

  • As the others have stated, the knapsack (for packing cargo) and traveling salesmen problem are probably the most common "real world" NP-complete problems.

    I tend to run into problems at work that can't be proven to be NP complete or incomplete because they're not very well defined.