20,951 research outputs found
A New Multilayered PCP and the Hardness of Hypergraph Vertex Cover
Given a -uniform hyper-graph, the E-Vertex-Cover problem is to find the
smallest subset of vertices that intersects every hyper-edge. We present a new
multilayered PCP construction that extends the Raz verifier. This enables us to
prove that E-Vertex-Cover is NP-hard to approximate within factor
for any and any . The result is
essentially tight as this problem can be easily approximated within factor .
Our construction makes use of the biased Long-Code and is analyzed using
combinatorial properties of -wise -intersecting families of subsets
Generic Expression Hardness Results for Primitive Positive Formula Comparison
We study the expression complexity of two basic problems involving the
comparison of primitive positive formulas: equivalence and containment. In
particular, we study the complexity of these problems relative to finite
relational structures. We present two generic hardness results for the studied
problems, and discuss evidence that they are optimal and yield, for each of the
problems, a complexity trichotomy
Comparative Performance of Tabu Search and Simulated Annealing Heuristics for the Quadratic Assignment Problem
For almost two decades the question of whether tabu search (TS) or simulated
annealing (SA) performs better for the quadratic assignment problem has been
unresolved. To answer this question satisfactorily, we compare performance at
various values of targeted solution quality, running each heuristic at its
optimal number of iterations for each target. We find that for a number of
varied problem instances, SA performs better for higher quality targets while
TS performs better for lower quality targets
Near-Optimal UGC-hardness of Approximating Max k-CSP_R
In this paper, we prove an almost-optimal hardness for Max -CSP based
on Khot's Unique Games Conjecture (UGC). In Max -CSP, we are given a set
of predicates each of which depends on exactly variables. Each variable can
take any value from . The goal is to find an assignment to
variables that maximizes the number of satisfied predicates.
Assuming the Unique Games Conjecture, we show that it is NP-hard to
approximate Max -CSP to within factor for any . To the best of our knowledge, this result
improves on all the known hardness of approximation results when . In this case, the previous best hardness result was
NP-hardness of approximating within a factor by Chan. When , our result matches the best known UGC-hardness result of Khot, Kindler,
Mossel and O'Donnell.
In addition, by extending an algorithm for Max 2-CSP by Kindler, Kolla
and Trevisan, we provide an -approximation algorithm
for Max -CSP. This algorithm implies that our inapproximability result
is tight up to a factor of . In comparison,
when is a constant, the previously known gap was , which is
significantly larger than our gap of .
Finally, we show that we can replace the Unique Games Conjecture assumption
with Khot's -to-1 Conjecture and still get asymptotically the same hardness
of approximation
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