P, NP, and NP-Completeness: The Basics of Computational Complexity

The focus of this book is the P versus NP Question and the theory of NP-completeness. It also provides adequate preliminaries regarding computational problems and computational models.

The P versus NP Question asks whether finding solutions is harder than checking the correctness of solutions. An alternative formulation asks whether discovering proofs is harder than verifying their correctness. It is widely believed that the answer to these equivalent formulations is positive, and this is ca...