@INPROCEEDINGS {, AUTHOR = "Tad Hogg", TITLE = "Which Search Problems Are Random?", BOOKTITLE = "Proc. of AAAI98", PAGES = "438-443", PUBLISHER = "AAAI Press", ADDRESS = "Menlo Park, CA", YEAR = "1998"}
Abstract
The typical difficulty of various NP-hard problems varies with simple
parameters describing their structure. This behavior is largely
independent of the search algorithm, but depends on the choice of
problem ensemble. A given problem instance belongs to many different
ensembles, so applying these observations to individual problems
requires identifying which ensemble is most appropriate for predicting
its search behavior, e.g., cost or solubility. To address this issue,
we introduce a readily computable measure of randomness for search
problems called approximate entropy. This new measure is better suited
to search than other approaches, such as algorithmic complexity and
information entropy. Experiments with graph coloring and 3SAT show how
this measure can be applied.
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