Houjun Liu

Beyond Worst-Case Analysis

There is no polynomial time algorithm \(A\) such that for all 3CNF \(\varphi\), \(A\qty(\varphi)\) accepts if and only if \(\varphi\) is satisfiable.

How do we relax this?

  1. we can say “for most” 3CNF formulas, which means that we have to name a distribution
  2. we can say to satisfy “most” \(\varphi\), meaning we can satisfy most clauses of \(\varphi\)
  3. allow more than poly-time (SoTA is at \(1.34\dots^{n}\)).

PCP Theorem

\(P \neq NP\) implies no polynomial time algorithm that finds \(x\) that satisfies \(99.9\%\) of clauses. In particular, no polytime algorithm that finds \(x\) that satisfies \(\geq \frac{7}{8} + \varepsilon\) fraction of the clauses.

Min-Bisection

Given a graph \(G\), split the vertices into two such that, with \(S \subseteq V\), \(| S | = \frac{n}{2}\), such that the number of edges \(s \leftrightarrow \bar{s}\) is minimized.