Notes on  NP- 

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.

J3N Research Labs

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