Solving problems in finite time

Philip W. Anderson ()
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Philip W. Anderson: the Joseph Henry Laboratories of Physics, Princeton University

Nature, 1999, vol. 400, issue 6740, 115-116

Abstract: Certain computing tasks — such as the travelling salesman problem — can take an exceptionally long time to solve. An attempt to understand these problems using ideas from statistical mechanics finds that such problems exhibit a discontinuous phase transition, across which drastic changes occur in the computational complexity.

Date: 1999
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DOI: 10.1038/22001

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