Tackling the Minimal Superpermutation Problem · HackerPapers discussions

Tackling the Minimal Superpermutation Problem — mentioned by robinhouston

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 19:59:53 GMT

The technique may be different, but the results seem to be identical to what you get from the standard method e.g. described in Section 2 of http://www.njohnston.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/minimal_s...; or section 1 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.5108.pdf; or as implemented by https://github.com/superpermutators/superperm/blob/master/bi... This method produces superpermutations of length 1! + 2! + ... + n!, which was believed for a long time to be the best possible. But Greg Egan’s new result shows it’s possible to do a lot better than that.

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Tackling the Minimal Superpermutation Problem — mentioned by robinhouston

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 22:31:20 GMT

Not so long ago, we’d say “That’s an NP-complete problem” with the implication that it was hopeless to expect an efficient solution. Now (to exaggerate a little) it’s more like a sign that there probably is an efficient solution using some powerful solver. LKH is a lovely piece of work. I used it a couple of years ago to find a counterexample to an unimportant but fairly long-standing conjecture in combinatorics[0], and the list of scientific applications[1] is impressively diverse. The best SMT solvers are also hugely impressive. Z3 has an excellent interactive tutorial and online solver.[2]…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.