Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH)

  • 1 Target Problem
  • 2 Description
  • 3 Implies the following Hypothesis
  • 4 Implied by the following Hypothesis
  • 5 Computation Model
  • 8 References/Citation

Target Problem

Description.

For every $\epsilon > 0$, there exists an integer $k \geq 3$ such that $k$-SAT cannot be solved in $O(2^{(1-\epsilon) n})$ time.

Implies the following Hypothesis

MBETH , ETH

Implied by the following Hypothesis

Computation model.

Word-RAM on $\log(n)$ bit words

References/Citation

Impagliazzo, Paturi, and Zane

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Exact Algorithms and Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online: 01 January 2016
  • Cite this reference work entry

strong exponential time hypothesis

  • Joshua R. Wang 2 &
  • Ryan Williams 3  

82 Accesses

1 Citations

Years and Authors of Summarized Original Work

2010; Păatraşscu, Williams

2011; Lokshtanov, Marx, Saurabh

2012; Cygan, Dell, Lokshtanov, Marx, Nederlof, Okamoto, Paturi, Saurabh, Wahlström

Problem Definition

All problems in NP can be exactly solved in 2 poly( n ) time via exhaustive search, but research has yielded faster exponential-time algorithms for many NP-hard problems. However, some key problems have not seen improved algorithms, and problems with improvements seem to converge toward O ( C n ) for some unknown constant C  > 1.

The satisfiability problem for Boolean formulas in conjunctive normal form, CNF-SAT, is a central problem that has resisted significant improvements. The complexity of CNF-SAT and its special case k -SAT, where each clause has k literals, is the canonical starting point for the development of NP-completeness theory.

Similarly, in the last 20 years, two hypotheses have emerged as powerful starting points for understanding exponential-time complexity. In 1999,...

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Recommended Reading

Calabro C, Impagliazzo R, Paturi R (2009) The complexity of satisfiability of small depth circuits. In: Chen J, Fomin F (eds) Parameterized and exact computation. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 5917. Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg, pp 75–85. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-11269-0_6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11269-0_6

Chen J, Chor B, Fellows M, Huang X, Juedes D, Kanj IA, Xia G (2005) Tight lower bounds for certain parameterized np-hard problems. Inf Comput 201(2):216–231. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ic.2005.05.001. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890540105000763

Cygan M, Dell H, Lokshtanov D, Marx D, Nederlof J, Okamoto Y, Paturi R, Saurabh S, Wahlstrom M (2012) On problems as hard as cnf-sat. In: Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE conference on computational complexity (CCC ’12), Washington, DC. IEEE Computer Society, pp 74–84. doi:10.1109/CCC.2012.36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CCC.2012.36

Fomin F, Kratsch D (2010) Exact exponential algorithms. Texts in theoretical computer science, an EATCS series. Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg

Google Scholar  

Impagliazzo R, Paturi R (2001) On the complexity of k-sat. J Comput Syst Sci 62(2):367–375. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jcss.2000.1727. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022000000917276

Impagliazzo R, Paturi R, Zane F (2001) Which problems have strongly exponential complexity? J Comput Syst Sci 63(4):512–530. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jcss.2001.1774. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002200000191774X

Lokshtanov D, Marx D, Saurabh S (2011) Known algorithms on graphs of bounded treewidth are probably optimal. In: Proceedings of the twenty-second Annual ACM-SIAM symposium on discrete algorithms (SODA ’11), San Francisco. SIAM, pp 777–789. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2133036.2133097

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Pătraşcu M, Williams R (2010) On the possibility of faster sat algorithms. In: Proceedings of the twenty-first annual ACM-SIAM symposium on discrete algorithms (SODA ’10), Philadelphia. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, pp 1065–1075. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1873601.1873687

Woeginger G (2003) Exact algorithms for np-hard problems: a survey. In: Jünger M, Reinelt G, Rinaldi G (eds) Combinatorial optimization Eureka, you shrink! Lecture notes in computer science, vol 2570. Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg, pp 185–207. doi:10.1007/3-540-36478-1_17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36478-1_17

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Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Joshua R. Wang

Ryan Williams

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Correspondence to Joshua R. Wang .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

Ming-Yang Kao

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Wang, J.R., Williams, R. (2016). Exact Algorithms and Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2864-4_519

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2864-4_519

Published : 22 April 2016

Publisher Name : Springer, New York, NY

Print ISBN : 978-1-4939-2863-7

Online ISBN : 978-1-4939-2864-4

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