rose.blog

What I’m going to try to do is list a bunch of applications that require the solutions of NP-complete or NP-hard problems. These will be found under the Applications tab in the sidebar.

I’m going to try to restrict the list to applications that have the following properties:

1. Problems people really want to solve are too big for exact solvers
2. People are not happy with the level of approximate solutions they can obtain with the best known heuristics
3. The people in 1. and/or 2. would see significant value in being able to solve bigger problems, faster and would make or save a lot of money if this were possible; I’ll try to include only if customers might be willing to pay in excess of $1B/year for satisfactory solution of their problems

Note I’m not saying these problems ACTUALLY have $1B markets, I’m saying that it might be possible. If anyone out there in blogland has actual market numbers to any of these problems that would be very useful.

Any suggestions for problems like this would be greatly appreciated (existing apps or new ones, doesn’t matter); any info on desired customer solution characteristics (size, accuracy, speed, etc.) would be great also.