A SYNOPSIS OF THE AUTHOR'S DOCTORAL WORK

Dr Antti J Ylikoski, Helsinki, Finland

The P/NP Question and the Clay Math Institute

The P versus NP problem (or P/NP problem) is one of the most (in science) famous unsolved
problems, and it has a great practical significance. Simply put, it is a question of verification of a
solution versus finding a solution; that is, can every problem where a computer can quickly verify
the solution also be quickly solved by a computer? The contents of my doctoral work can be
succinctly explained by saying, that it consists of applying Artificial Intelligence research to this
famous P/NP question.
The U.S. Clay Mathematical Institute have published a set of unsolved, famous problems in science,
and the correct solution to each one of these problems will be rewarded with a prize of a million
dollars. I cannot allege that I have solved the P/NP problem, but I have shed enough novel light
unto the problem to be granted a HonDL, the degree of a Doctor of Letters, Litterarum doctor, from
the United Kingdom. (The Doctor of Letters is granted not for the dissertation alone, but for a large
body of scientific work, almost all of which is unfortunately pretty classified.)
Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of scientists have worked on the P/NP problem,
and quite a great deal is known about it. In particular, there exist various approximation algorithms,
which can be used to solve practical cases of this problem satisfactorily, even though not entirely
rigorously right.
In an U.S. Computer science publication (ACM SIGACT NEWS) there was there a collection of
interviews of notable theoretical computer scientists concerning, how long it would probably take to
have this P/NP problem solved. The result was: perhaps 200 more years of research.
I want to compare this situation with the case of the Fermat's Grand Theorem. Solving it took some
400 years, and the work of thousands of researchers. Therefore, the individual who is credited with
the solution of Fermat's Grand Theorem, indeed did “stand on the shoulders of giants”, as Isaac
Newton said, and the solution for the P/NP question will as well be like that.
The Significance of the P/NP Question

The P/NP question, as I said, has a very great practical significance, from the efficiency of
operations research computer solutions, to the security of cryptological algorithms, to a plethora of
other computerized problems. I have been said to that a PhD level specialist is needed to create a
cryptosystem which cannot be cracked by the international professional intelligence agencies. (My
favourite intel story relates about how, in the Cold War, the US intelligence cracked the Russkies'
OTP, the One-Time Pad, even though beating the OTP system is known to be impossible – it even
is provably impossible. Recall how many agent movies and books have had names such as
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, or similar to that?)
Work at the Aalto University, née the HUT

This work was created and guided in the Helsinki University of Technology, the HUT, who later on
became the Aalto University. However, the degree of the Litterarum doctor came from the United
Kingdom. The neat way to explain this would be to write that the HUT professors said to me,
pretty frankly but in between the lines, that there was not a scientific reason for this, but the reason
was some political and academic intrigue.

Mathematical Models of Processing Information

During the first half of the 1900's, many mathematicians and philosophers were researching the
question, how to mathematically model the processing of information. The most famous one of
them was Alan Turing. Turing finally devised a mathematical model which was to be known as the
”Turing machine”. That model is highly simple, but it is in some sense maximally general.
Therefore, it is, so to talk, not difficult to derive mathematical results for the Turing machine, but
those results will be extremely general, and in essence valid for all computing devices. That was
the essence of Turing's genius: the results are simple to derive, but they are very general and useful.
During the same era, approximately a dozen different but provably equivalent models of
computation were devised. They all are said to be Turing-equivalent.

What, Actually, is the P/NP Question?

Now how can we mathematically handle, the difficulty of a problem – any problem whatsoever?
And how can we mathematically discuss, the relationship of the difficulty of a problem, to the
difficulty of solving it?
Any problem, whatever it may be, must be possible to be described in a language. So the problem
can be written down as a finite symbol string, and here to be realistic, we shall say that the symbol
alphabet is finite. Then, an extremely simple but an extremely general way to measure the
difficulty of that problem is – the length of the symbol string which describes it, the length in
individual symbols.
And how shall we solve the problem with some information processing system? Obviously, the
problem must be given as the input to some suitable Turing machine!
The Turing machine operates in individual steps, very very much like a computer processor works
driven by its discrete clock frequency, in individual steps. But then we can count the number of
steps which the Turing machine needs to use, to solve the problem which was given to it.
After all this, it is obvious how the problem presented in the beginning of this chapter can be
solved. All we need to do, is to discuss the relationship of the length of the symbol string, and the
number of steps which are needed to solve the problem!
This concept is actually extremely deep and important: it is termed the complexity of computation,
and numerous shelf metres of books have been written about it.
If the steps to solve the problem – or, in other words, the computation time – are a polynomial
function of the length of the symbol string, then that problem is said to be polynomial-time, usually
written ”P”.
There is an extremely important variant of the basic Turing machine, it is the nondeterministic
Turing machine, the NDTM. The NDTM really is a mathematical creation. The definition is quite
technical; we shall not delve into that here.
But suppose that we give a symbol string to an NDTM, and it can solve the problem in a time which
is a polynomial in the length of the mentioned symbol string. Then that problem is said to be
nondeterministic polynomial-time, which is usually written ”NP”.
And now comes the Clay Institute million-dollar question: What is the relationship of the sets P and
NP?
Literally thousands of important problems – also, important in terms of money and military security
– depend on that seemingly simple mathematical question. Isn't it marvelous how highly abstract
and in the same time, practically important, computer science can be?

The Research Program

I created a partial solution for the P/NP question, actually a proof, for a certain very general
algorithm family. But professors and researchers who read that early work soon suggested other
algorithm families, which might be used to attack the problem.
And then comes des Pudels Kern, as Goethe said:
What if we can create a classification, a cathegorization, even a taxonomy of algorithms which
could potentially be used to attack the P/NP question, and we could prove that this taxonomy –
whatever – is exhaustive? Then we would need to write a proof for every individual algorithm
cathegory, every algorithm class, in that list. After that, the 200-year one-million-dollar problem
would have been solved!

And that research program is the main result in my work.

What Did We Learn?

The main lesson from the above is that the synergy, the cross-fertilization of theoretical computer
science and Artificial Intelligence was a good idea.