Introduction to algorithms
Interactive proofs and the hardness of approximating cliques
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
On Unapproximable Versions of NP-Complete Problems
SIAM Journal on Computing
Some optimal inapproximability results
STOC '97 Proceedings of the twenty-ninth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Decoding of Reed Solomon codes beyond the error-correction bound
Journal of Complexity
Probabilistic checking of proofs: a new characterization of NP
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Proof verification and the hardness of approximation problems
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Chinese remaindering with errors
STOC '99 Proceedings of the thirty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
List decoding algorithms for certain concatenated codes
STOC '00 Proceedings of the thirty-second annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness
Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness
Computing From Partial Solutions
COCO '99 Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity
Proofs, Codes, and Polynomial-Time Reducibilities
COCO '99 Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity
A Probabilistic Algorithm for k-SAT and Constraint Satisfaction Problems
FOCS '99 Proceedings of the 40th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Structure approximation of most probable explanations in bayesian networks
ECSQARU'13 Proceedings of the 12th European conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty
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The search version for NP-complete combinatorial optimization problems asks for finding a solution of optimal value. Such a solution is called a witness. We follow a recent paper by Kumar and Sivakumar, and study a relatively new notion of approximate solutions that ignores the value of a solution and instead considers its syntactic representation (under some standard encoding scheme). The results that we present are of a negative nature. We show that for many of the well known NP-complete problems (such as 3-SAT, CLIQUE, 3-COLORING, SET COVER) it is NP-hard to produce a solution whose Hamming distance from an optimal solution is substantially closer than what one would obtain by just taking a random solution. In fact, we have been able to show similar results for most of Karp's 21 original NP-complete problems. (At the moment, our results are not tight only for UNDIRECTED HAMILTONIAN CYCLE and FEEDBACK EDGE SET).