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108 points BerislavLopac | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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andrewla ◴[] No.43716179[source]
The example given doesn't seem right to me.

> There is one problem, though, that I find easily explainable. Place a token at the bottom left corner of a grid that extends infinitely up and right, call that point (0, 0). You're given list of valid displacement moves for the token, like (+1, +0), (-20, +13), (-5, -6), etc, and a target point like (700, 1). You may make any sequence of moves in any order, as long as no move ever puts the token off the grid. Does any sequence of moves bring you to the target?

If someone gives you such a sequence, it seems trivial to verify it in linear time. Even for arbitrary dimensions, and such witness can be verified in linear time.

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hwayne ◴[] No.43717130[source]
To be in NP, witness must be verifiable in polynomial time with respect to the size of the original input. In this problem (VAS Reachability), the solution can be `2^2^2^...^K` steps long. Even if that's linear with respect to the witness, it's not polynomial with respect to the set of moves + goal.
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andrewla ◴[] No.43719822[source]
Hmm.. I'd love to see a more formal statement of this, because it feels unintuitive.

Notably the question "given a number as input, output as many 1's as that number" is exponential in the input size. Is this problem therefore also strictly NP-hard?

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1. throwaway81523 ◴[] No.43726574[source]
In the definition of NP, you get the input in unary, so that gets rid of that exponential. The issue with VAS is that the number of moves required could be extremely large.

There's a similar situation in chess (at least if generalized to N by N). You could assert Black has a forced win from a given position, but verifying the claim requires checking the entire game tree, rather than a succinct certificate. Generalized chess is in fact PSPACE-complete, which is generally believed to be outside of NP.