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The Berman–Hartmanis Conjecture

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Posed by Len Berman / Juris Hartmanis · 1977 · computational complexity · ~1 min read · difficulty 4/5

complexity-theory

The problem

Berman–Hartmanis conjecture: all NP-complete languages are pairwise p-isomorphic — for any two NP-complete sets \(A, B\) there is a polynomial-time computable bijection \(f\) with polynomial-time inverse such that \(x \in A \iff f(x) \in B\).

History & significance

Berman and Hartmanis proposed it in 1977 from the observation that all then-known NP-complete sets looked the same up to polynomial-time recoding. It would follow from the (also open) conjecture that there are no sparse NP-complete sets (Mahaney's theorem gives this for sparse NP-hard sets under the assumption P ≠ NP, in the many-one sense). Joseph–Young's 1985 candidate counterexample (a padded, non-isomorphic NP-complete set) collapses under stronger reducibilities, leaving the original p-isomorphism question exactly where it was.

More in computational complexity

Still open.

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