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Estimating the Hardness of Optimisation

Sylvie Thiébaux, John Slaney, Phil Kilby

Estimating computational cost is a fundamental issue in time-bounded computation. We present a method for estimating the hardness of optimisation problems (find a minimal cost solution to instance I) by observing that of the corresponding decision problems (has I a solution of cost less than threshold T). Provided T is not too close to the optimal, decision is typically much easier than optimisation, yet knowing the hardness of the former is useful for predicting the latter. The present paper reports an experimental investigation of this idea, with encouraging results. An investment of a few percent of the work required for optimisation suffices for estimation within a small factor, even using a very simple implementation of the method.

Keywords: search

Citation: Sylvie Thiébaux, John Slaney, Phil Kilby: Estimating the Hardness of Optimisation. In W.Horn (ed.): ECAI2000, Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2000, pp.123-127.


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ECAI-2000 is organised by the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and hosted by the Humboldt University on behalf of Gesellschaft für Informatik.