Comment on Open thread, July 16-22, 2013

Thu, 18 Jul 2013 16:02:24 GMT

I think this misunderstands the state of modern complexity theory.

There are lots of NP-complete problems that are well known to have highly accurate approximations that can be computed efficiently. The knapsack problem and traveling-salesperson in 2D Euclidean space are both examples of this. Unfortunately, having an epsilon-close approximation for one NP-complete problem doesn't necessarily help you on other NP-complete problems.

There's nothing particularly magic about evolutionary algorithms here. Any sensible local search will often work well on instances of NP-complete problems.

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