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Computational science

Can get satisfaction

Nature volume 435, pages 751–752 (2005)Cite this article

The sheer complexity of some computational problems means they will probably never be solved, despite the ever-increasing resources available. But we can sometimes predict under what conditions solutions exist.

Computer scientists have been quite successful at developing fast algorithms: Google, for example, searches its index of more than eight billion web pages in a fraction of a second. The indexed-search problem is said to be ‘tractable’, or efficiently solvable; it is even possible to guarantee that, no matter what keywords you search on, you will get an answer quickly. Such a worst-case efficiency guarantee is the gold standard for algorithm design. But unfortunately, such a guarantee is not always possible: for many computational problems, we can either prove that no efficient algorithm exists, or we have good evidence that such an algorithm is unlikely to exist. Achlioptas et al.1 (page 759 of this issue) provide a series of rigorous insights into a class of computational puzzles — known as constraint-satisfaction problems — that occur in areas as diverse as the scheduling of airline and train crews, data-mining, software design and computational biology.

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Figure 1: Web of constraint.
Figure 2: Finding satisfaction.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Applied Economics and Management and of Computer Science, Faculty of Computing and Information Science,

    Carla P. Gomes & Bart Selman

  2. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, 14853, New York, USA

    Carla P. Gomes & Bart Selman

Authors
  1. Carla P. Gomes
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  2. Bart Selman
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Gomes, C., Selman, B. Can get satisfaction. Nature 435, 751–752 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/435751a

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