Copyright © 1989 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
On inefficient special cases of NP-complete problems*1
Communicated by A. Salomaa
Available online 25 March 2002.
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Abstract
Every intractable set A has a polynomial complexity core, a set H such that for any P-subset S of A or of
, S∩H is finite. A complexity core H of A is proper if H
A. It is shown here that if P≠NP, then every currently known (i.e., either invertibly paddable or k-creative) NP-complete set A and its complement
have proper polynomial complexity cores that are nonsparse and are accepted by deterministic machines in time 2cn for some constant c. Turning to the intractable class D
=
c>0D
(2cn), it is shown that every set that is
pm-complete for D
has an infinite proper polynomial complexity core that is nonsparse and recursive.







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