NP-
Prev | N | Next

NP-: /N·P/, pref.

  Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or quality of difficulty; the connotation is often ‘more so than it should be’. This is generalized from the computer-science terms NP-hard and NP-complete; NP-complete problems all seem to be very hard, but so far no one has found a proof that they are. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial problems, those that can be completed by a nondeterministic Turing machine in an amount of time that is a polynomial function of the size of the input; a solution for one NP-complete problem would solve all the others. “Coding a BitBlt implementation to perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying.”

  Note, however, that strictly speaking this usage is misleading; there are plenty of easy problems in class NP. NP-complete problems are hard not because they are in class NP, but because they are the hardest problems in class NP.

Prev | Up | Next
notwork | Home | NSA line eater