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All the needles in a haystack: Can exhaustive search overcome combinatorial chaos?

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Computer Science Today

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1000))

Abstract

For half a century since computers came into existence, the goal of finding elegant and efficient algorithms to solve “simple” (welldefined and well-structured) problems has dominated algorithm design. Over the same time period, both processing and storage capacity of computers have increased roughly by a factor of 106. The next few decades may well give us a similar rate of growth in raw computing power, due to various factors such as continuing miniaturization, parallel and distributed computing. If a quantitative change of orders of magnitude leads to qualitative changes, where will the latter take place? Many problems exhibit no detectable regular structure to be exploited, they appear “chaotic”, and do not yield to efficient algorithms. Exhaustive search of large state spaces appears to be the only viable approach. We survey techniques for exhaustive search, typical combinatorial problems that have been solved, and present one case study in detail.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich, CH-8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Jürg Nievergelt, Ralph Gasser, Fabian Mäser & Christoph Wirth

Authors
  1. Jürg Nievergelt
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  2. Ralph Gasser
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  3. Fabian Mäser
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  4. Christoph Wirth
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Jan van Leeuwen

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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Nievergelt, J., Gasser, R., Mäser, F., Wirth, C. (1995). All the needles in a haystack: Can exhaustive search overcome combinatorial chaos?. In: van Leeuwen, J. (eds) Computer Science Today. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1000. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0015248

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0015248

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60105-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49435-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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