Modules 10 and 11

Review questions

1. What is a combinatorial optimization problem? Give an example of something that is not.
2. What is the difference between a constructive heuristic and a state-space search heuristic? Explain using bin-packing as an example.
3. Explain the above in terms of the traveling salesman problem.
4. What does neighborhood mean in the context of state-space search?
5. What is the term problem landscape mean?
6. What is the difficulty with state-space search?
7. How did we address this difficulty?
8. What are the four types of problems in terms of the level of difficulty?
9. What is the decision version of a problem? Explain in terms of bin packing.
10. What does it mean to transform one problem into another?
11. What is the vertex cover problem?
12. What is the SAT problem?
13. What is an NP problem?
14. Explain Cook's famous result.
15. What is an NP-Complete problem?
16. If a problem is NP-Complete, what is the implication? For example, if I were to find a fast (polynomial) algorithm for the vertex-cover problem, what is the implication?