AlexMennen comments on Tiling Agents for Self-Modifying AI (OPFAI #2) - Less Wrong

55 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 June 2013 08:24PM

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Comment author: AlexMennen 02 July 2013 01:13:30AM 2 points [-]

If a problem is NP-complete, then by definition, any NP problem can be solved in polynomial time by an algorithm which is given an oracle that solves the NP-complete problem, which it is allowed to use once. If, in place of the oracle, you substitute a polynomial-time algorithm which solves the problem correctly 90% of the time, the algorithm will still be polynomial-time, and will necessarily run correctly at least 90% of the time.

However, as JoshuaZ points out, this requires that the algorithm solve every instance of the problem with high probability, which is a much stronger condition than just solving a high proportion of instances. In retrospect, my comment was unhelpful, since it is not known whether there are any algorithms than solve every instance of an NP-complete problem with high probability. I don't know how generalizable the known tricks for solving SAT are (although presumably they are much more generalizable than JoshuaZ's example).

Comment author: JonahSinick 02 July 2013 01:38:38AM 2 points [-]

In retrospect, my comment was unhelpful, since it is not known whether there are any algorithms than solve every instance of an NP-complete problem with high probability.

This is the key. If you had an algorithm that solved every instance of an NP-complete problem in polynomial time with high probability, you could generate a proof of the Riemann hypothesis with high probability! (Provided that the polynomial time algorithm is pretty fast, and that the proof isn't too long)