On linear characterizations of combinatorial optimization problems

  • Authors:
  • Richard M. Karp;Christos H. Papadimitriou

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • SFCS '80 Proceedings of the 21st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 1980

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Abstract

We show that there can be no computationally tractable description by linear inequalities of the polyhedron associated with any NP-complete combinatorial optimization problem unless NP = co-NP -- a very unlikely event. We also apply the ellipsoid method for linear programming to show that a combinatorial optimization problem is solvable in polynomial time if and only if it admits a small generator of violated inequalities.