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Good concise explanation. For those who missed it a few months back, I wrote a blog post which contained an explanation of NP and, more importantly, why it's important for programmers to recognise NP problems.

The section headings 'Understanding NP-complete completely useless?' and 'Recognising NP-complete problems' are the most relevant. http://lifebeyondfife.com/helping/

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Cool post, and nice tool! Until now I've kind of been one of those that have been able to identify NP problems and know that "there are ways to optimize them" but haven't had much experience in actually optimizing any in the real world.

I enjoyed the explanations of how heuristics and inference fit in to solving those problems, and it was cool to see how little the code needed to change to include those optimizing constraints.

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