I am trying to solve the N-puzzle using the A* algorithm with 3 different heuristic functions. I want to know how to compare each of the heuristics in terms of time complexity. The heuristics I am using are: manhattan distance , manhattan distance + linear conflict, N-max swap. And specifically for an 8-puzzle and an 15-puzzle.
The N-puzzle is, in general, NP hard to find the shortest solution, so no matter what heuristic you use it's unlikely you'll be able to find any difference in complexity between them, since you won't be prove the tightness of any bound.
If you restrict yourself to the 8-puzzle or 15-puzzle, an A* algorithm with any admissible heuristic will run in O(1) time since there are a finite (albeit large) number of board positions.
As #Harold said in his comment, the approach to compare time complexity of heuristic functions is tipically by experimental tests. In your case, generate a set of n random problems for the 8-puzzle and the 15-puzzle and solve them using the different heuristic functions. Things to be aware of are:
The comparison will always depend on several factors, like hardware expecs, programming language, your skills when implementing the algorithm, ...
Generally speaking, a more informed heuristic will always expand less nodes than a less informed one, and will probably be faster.
And finally, in order to compare the three heuristics for each problem set, I would suggest a graphic with average running times (repeat for example 5 times each problem) where:
The problems are in the x-axis sorted by difficulty.
The running times are in the y-axis for each heuristic function (perhaps in logarithmic scale if the difference between the alternatives cannot be easily seen).
and a similar graphic with the number of explored states.
From what I understand, randomised algorithm could give wrong answer.For example, using contraction algorithm to solve graph min-cut problem, you need to run the algorithm n^2*ln(n) times so that the possibility of failing to get the correct answer is at most 1/n. No matter how small the possibility of failure is, the answer could be incorrect, so when is the right time that we allow the incorrect answer?
To begin with, I think you need to differentiate between different classes of randomized algorithms:
A Monte Carlo algorithm is an algorithm which is random w.r.t. correctness. The randomized min-cut algorithm, from your question, is an example of such an algorithm.
A Las Vegas algorithm is an algorithm which is random w.r.t. running time. Randomized quicksort, for example, is such an algorithm.
You seem to mean Monte-Carlo algorithms in your question.
The question of whether a Monte-Carlo algorithm is suitable to you, probably can't be answered objectively, because it is based on something like the ecomonic theory of utility. Given two algorithms, A and B, then each invocation of A or B takes some time t and gives you the result whose correctness is c. The utility U(t, c) is a random variable, and only you can determine whether the distribution of UA(T, C) is better or worse than UB(T, C). Some examples, where algorithm A performs twice as fast as B, but errs with probability 1e-6:
If these are preference recommendations on a website, then it might be worth it for you to have your website twice as responsive as that of a competitor, at the risk that, rarely, a client gets wrong recommendations.
If these are control systems for a nuclear reactor (to borrow from TemplateTypedef's comment), then a slight chance of failure might not be worth the time saving (e.g., you probably would be better investing in a processor twice as fast running the slower algorithm).
The two examples above show that each of the two choices might be correct for different settings. In fact, utility theory rarely shows sets of choices that are clearly wrong. In the introduction to the book Randomized Algorithms by Motwani and Raghavan, however, the authors do give such an example for the fallacy of avoiding Monte-Carlo algorithms. The probability of a CPU malfunctioning due to cosmic radiation is some α (whose value I forget). Thus avoiding running a Monte-Carlo algorithm with probability of error much lower than α, is probably simply irrational.
You'll always need to analyze the properties of the algorithm and decide if the risk of a non-optimal answer is bearable in your application. (If the answer is Boolean, then "non-optimal" is the same as "wrong.")
There are many kinds of programming problems where some answer that's close to optimal and obtained in reasonable time is much better than the optimal answer provided too late or not at all.
The Traveling Salesman problem is an example. If you are Walmart and need to plan delivery routes each night for given sets of cities, getting a route that's close to optimal is much better than no route or a naively chosen one or the best possible route obtained 2 days from now.
There are many kinds of guarantees provided by randomized algorithms. They often have the form error <= F(cost), where error and cost can be almost anything. The cost may be expressed in run time or how many repeat runs are spent looking for better answers. Space may also figure in cost. The error may be probability of a wrong 1/0 answer, a distance metric from an optimal result, a discrete count of erroneous components, etc., etc.
Sometimes you just have to live with a maybe-wrong answer because there's no useful alternative. Primality testing on big numbers is in this category. Though there are polynomial time deterministic tests, they are still much slower than a probabilistic test that produces the correct answer for all practical purposes.
For example, if you have a Boolean randomized function where True results are always correct, but False are wrong 50% of the time, then you are in pretty good shape. (The Miller-Rabin primality test is actually better than this.)
Suppose you can afford to run the algorithm 40 times. If any of the runs says False, you know the answer is False. If they're all True then the probability of that the real answer if false is roughly 2^40 = 1/(1 trillion).
Even in safety-critical applications, this may be a fine result. The chance of being hit by lightning in a lifetime is about 1/10,000. We all live with that and don't give it a second thought.
There are a lot of real-world problems that turn out to be NP-hard. If we assume that P ≠ NP, there aren't any polynomial-time algorithms for these problems.
If you have to solve one of these problems, is there any hope that you'll be able to do so efficiently? Or are you just out of luck?
If a problem is NP-hard, under the assumption that P ≠ NP there is no algorithm that is
deterministic,
exactly correct on all inputs all the time, and
efficient on all possible inputs.
If you absolutely need all of the above guarantees, then you're pretty much out of luck. However, if you're willing to settle for a solution to the problem that relaxes some of these constraints, then there very well still might be hope! Here are a few options to consider.
Option One: Approximation Algorithms
If a problem is NP-hard and P ≠ NP, it means that there's is no algorithm that will always efficiently produce the exactly correct answer on all inputs. But what if you don't need the exact answer? What if you just need answers that are close to correct? In some cases, you may be able to combat NP-hardness by using an approximation algorithm.
For example, a canonical example of an NP-hard problem is the traveling salesman problem. In this problem, you're given as input a complete graph representing a transportation network. Each edge in the graph has an associated weight. The goal is to find a cycle that goes through every node in the graph exactly once and which has minimum total weight. In the case where the edge weights satisfy the triangle inequality (that is, the best route from point A to point B is always to follow the direct link from A to B), then you can get back a cycle whose cost is at most 3/2 optimal by using the Christofides algorithm.
As another example, the 0/1 knapsack problem is known to be NP-hard. In this problem, you're given a bag and a collection of objects with different weights and values. The goal is to pack the maximum value of objects into the bag without exceeding the bag's weight limit. Even though computing an exact answer requires exponential time in the worst case, it's possible to approximate the correct answer to an arbitrary degree of precision in polynomial time. (The algorithm that does this is called a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme or FPTAS).
Unfortunately, we do have some theoretical limits on the approximability of certain NP-hard problems. The Christofides algorithm mentioned earlier gives a 3/2 approximation to TSP where the edges obey the triangle inequality, but interestingly enough it's possible to show that if P ≠ NP, there is no polynomial-time approximation algorithm for TSP that can get within any constant factor of optimal. Usually, you need to do some research to learn more about which problems can be well-approximated and which ones can't, since many NP-hard problems can be approximated well and many can't. There doesn't seem to be a unified theme.
Option Two: Heuristics
In many NP-hard problems, standard approaches like greedy algortihms won't always produce the right answer, but often do reasonably well on "reasonable" inputs. In many cases, it's reasonable to attack NP-hard problems with heuristics. The exact definition of a heuristic varies from context to context, but typically a heuristic is either an approach to a problem that "often" gives back good answers at the cost of sometimes giving back wrong answers, or is a useful rule of thumb that helps speed up searches even if it might not always guide the search the right way.
As an example of the first type of heuristic, let's look at the graph-coloring problem. This NP-hard problem asks, given a graph, to find the minimum number of colors necessary to paint the nodes in the graph such that no edge's endpoints are the same color. This turns out to be a particularly tough problem to solve with many other approaches (the best known approximation algorithms have terrible bounds, and it's not suspected to have a parameterized efficient algorithm). However, there are many heuristics for graph coloring that do quite well in practice. Many greedy coloring heuristics exist for assigning colors to nodes in a reasonable order, and these heuristics often do quite well in practice. Unfortunately, sometimes these heuristics give terrible answers back, but provided that the graph isn't pathologically constructed the heuristics often work just fine.
As an example of the second type of heuristic, it's helpful to look at SAT solvers. SAT, the Boolean satisfiability problem, was the first problem proven to be NP-hard. The problem asks, given a propositional formula (often written in conjunctive normal form), to determine whether there is a way to assign values to the variables such that the overall formula evaluates to true. Modern SAT solvers are getting quite good at solving SAT in many cases by using heuristics to guide their search over possible variable assignments. One famous SAT-solving algorithm, DPLL, essentially tries all possible assignments to see if the formula is satisfiable, using heuristics to speed up the search. For example, if it finds that a variable is either always true or always false, DPLL will try assigning that variable its forced value before trying other variables. DPLL also finds unit clauses (clauses with just one literal) and sets those variables' values before trying other variables. The net effect of these heuristics is that DPLL ends up being very fast in practice, even though it's known to have exponential worst-case behavior.
Option Three: Pseudopolynomial-Time Algorithms
If P ≠ NP, then no NP-hard problem can be solved in polynomial time. However, in some cases, the definition of "polynomial time" doesn't necessarily match the standard intuition of polynomial time. Formally speaking, polynomial time means polynomial in the number of bits necessary to specify the input, which doesn't always sync up with what we consider the input to be.
As an example, consider the set partition problem. In this problem, you're given a set of numbers and need to determine whether there's a way to split the set into two smaller sets, each of which has the same sum. The naive solution to this problem runs in time O(2n) and works by just brute-force testing all subsets. With dynamic programming, though, it's possible to solve this problem in time O(nN), where n is the number of elements in the set and N is the maximum value in the set. Technically speaking, the runtime O(nN) is not polynomial time because the numeric value N is written out in only log2 N bits, but assuming that the numeric value of N isn't too large, this is a perfectly reasonable runtime.
This algorithm is called a pseudopolynomial-time algorithm because the runtime O(nN) "looks" like a polynomial, but technically speaking is exponential in the size of the input. Many NP-hard problems, especially ones involving numeric values, admit pseudopolynomial-time algorithms and are therefore easy to solve assuming that the numeric values aren't too large.
For more information on pseudopolynomial time, check out this earlier Stack Overflow question about pseudopolynomial time.
Option Four: Randomized Algorithms
If a problem is NP-hard and P ≠ NP, then there is no deterministic algorithm that can solve that problem in worst-case polynomial time. But what happens if we allow for algorithms that introduce randomness? If we're willing to settle for an algorithm that gives a good answer on expectation, then we can often get relatively good answers to NP-hard problems in not much time.
As an example, consider the maximum cut problem. In this problem, you're given an undirected graph and want to find a way to split the nodes in the graph into two nonempty groups A and B with the maximum number of edges running between the groups. This has some interesting applications in computational physics (unfortunately, I don't understand them at all, but you can peruse this paper for some details about this). This problem is known to be NP-hard, but there's a simple randomized approximation algorithm for it. If you just toss each node into one of the two groups completely at random, you end up with a cut that, on expectation, is within 50% of the optimal solution.
Returning to SAT, many modern SAT solvers use some degree of randomness to guide the search for a satisfying assignment. The WalkSAT and GSAT algorithms, for example, work by picking a random clause that isn't currently satisfied and trying to satisfy it by flipping some variable's truth value. This often guides the search toward a satisfying assignment, causing these algorithms to work well in practice.
It turns out there's a lot of open theoretical problems about the ability to solve NP-hard problems using randomized algorithms. If you're curious, check out the complexity class BPP and the open problem of its relation to NP.
Option Five: Parameterized Algorithms
Some NP-hard problems take in multiple different inputs. For example, the long path problem takes as input a graph and a length k, then asks whether there's a simple path of length k in the graph. The subset sum problem takes in as input a set of numbers and a target number k, then asks whether there's a subset of the numbers that dds up to exactly k.
Interestingly, in the case of the long path problem, there's an algorithm (the color-coding algorithm) whose runtime is O((n3 log n) · bk), where n is the number of nodes, k is the length of the requested path, and b is some constant. This runtime is exponential in k, but is only polynomial in n, the number of nodes. This means that if k is fixed and known in advance, the runtime of the algorithm as a function of the number of nodes is only O(n3 log n), which is quite a nice polynomial. Similarly, in the case of the subset sum problem, there's a dynamic programming algorithm whose runtime is O(nW), where n is the number of elements of the set and W is the maximum weight of those elements. If W is fixed in advance as some constant, then this algorithm will run in time O(n), meaning that it will be possible to exactly solve subset sum in linear time.
Both of these algorithms are examples of parameterized algorithms, algorithms for solving NP-hard problems that split the hardness of the problem into two pieces - a "hard" piece that depends on some input parameter to the problem, and an "easy" piece that scales gracefully with the size of the input. These algorithms can be useful for finding exact solutions to NP-hard problems when the parameter in question is small. The color-coding algorithm mentioned above, for example, has proven quite useful in practice in computational biology.
However, some problems are conjectured to not have any nice parameterized algorithms. Graph coloring, for example, is suspected to not have any efficient parameterized algorithms. In the cases where parameterized algorithms exist, they're often quite efficient, but you can't rely on them for all problems.
For more information on parameterized algorithms, check out this earlier Stack Overflow question.
Option Six: Fast Exponential-Time Algorithms
Exponential-time algorithms don't scale well - their runtimes approach the lifetime of the universe for inputs as small as 100 or 200 elements.
What if you need to solve an NP-hard problem, but you know the input is reasonably small - say, perhaps its size is somewhere between 50 and 70. Standard exponential-time algorithms are probably not going to be fast enough to solve these problems. What if you really do need an exact solution to the problem and the other approaches here won't cut it?
In some cases, there are "optimized" exponential-time algorithms for NP-hard problems. These are algorithms whose runtime is exponential, but not as bad an exponential as the naive solution. For example, a simple exponential-time algorithm for the 3-coloring problem (given a graph, determine if you can color the nodes one of three colors each so that no edge's endpoints are the same color) might work checking each possible way of coloring the nodes in the graph, testing if any of them are 3-colorings. There are 3n possible ways to do this, so in the worst case the runtime of this algorithm will be O(3n · poly(n)) for some small polynomial poly(n). However, using more clever tricks and techniques, it's possible to develop an algorithm for 3-colorability that runs in time O(1.3289n). This is still an exponential-time algorithm, but it's a much faster exponential-time algorithm. For example, 319 is about 109, so if a computer can do one billion operations per second, it can use our initial brute-force algorithm to (roughly speaking) solve 3-colorability in graphs with up to 19 nodes in one second. Using the O((1.3289n)-time exponential algorithm, we could solve instances of up to about 73 nodes in about a second. That's a huge improvement - we've grown the size we can handle in one second by more than a factor of three!
As another famous example, consider the traveling salesman problem. There's an obvious O(n! · poly(n))-time solution to TSP that works by enumerating all permutations of the nodes and testing the paths resulting from those permutations. However, by using a dynamic programming algorithm similar to that used by the color-coding algorithm, it's possible to improve the runtime to "only" O(n2 2n). Given that 13! is about one billion, the naive solution would let you solve TSP for 13-node graphs in roughly a second. For comparison, the DP solution lets you solve TSP on 28-node graphs in about one second.
These fast exponential-time algorithms are often useful for boosting the size of the inputs that can be exactly solved in practice. Of course, they still run in exponential time, so these approaches are typically not useful for solving very large problem instances.
Option Seven: Solve an Easy Special Case
Many problems that are NP-hard in general have restricted special cases that are known to be solvable efficiently. For example, while in general it’s NP-hard to determine whether a graph has a k-coloring, in the specific case of k = 2 this is equivalent to checking whether a graph is bipartite, which can be checked in linear time using a modified depth-first search. Boolean satisfiability is, generally speaking, NP-hard, but it can be solved in polynomial time if you have an input formula with at most two literals per clause, or where the formula is formed from clauses using XOR rather than inclusive-OR, etc. Finding the largest independent set in a graph is generally speaking NP-hard, but if the graph is bipartite this can be done efficiently due to König’s theorem.
As a result, if you find yourself needing to solve what might initially appear to be an NP-hard problem, first check whether the inputs you actually need to solve that problem on have some additional restricted structure. If so, you might be able to find an algorithm that applies to your special case and runs much faster than a solver for the problem in its full generality.
Conclusion
If you need to solve an NP-hard problem, don't despair! There are lots of great options available that might make your intractable problem a lot more approachable. No one of the above techniques works in all cases, but by using some combination of these approaches, it's usually possible to make progress even when confronted with NP-hardness.
What does it mean by saying "an algorithm is exact" in terms of Optimization and/or Computer Science? I need a precisely logical/epistemological definition.
Exact and approximate algorithms are methods for solving optimization problems.
Exact algorithms are algorithms that always find the optimal solution to a given optimization problem.
However, in combinatorial problems or total optimization problems, conventional methods are usually not effective enough, especially when the problem search area is large and complex. Among other methods we can use heuristics to solve that problems. Heuristics tend to give suboptimal solutions. A subset of heuristics are approximation algorithms.
When we use approximation algorithms we can prove a bound on the ratio between the optimal solution and the solution produced by the algorithm.
E.g. In some NP-hard problems there are some polynomial-time approximation algorithms while the best known exact algorithms need exponential time.
For example while there is a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for Vertex Cover, the best exact algorithm (using memoization) runs in O(1.1889n) pp 62-63.
The term exact is usually used to mean "the opposite of approximate". An approximation algorithm finds a solution to a slight variation of an optimzation problem that admits soltions that are "close" to the optimum in some sense, but nonetheless are desirable. As #Sirko said in the comments, the approximation is usually of interest because the exact problem is intractable or undecidable, where the approximate version is not. Often, more than one kind of approximation may be of interest.
Here are examples:
An exact algorithm for the Traveling Salesman problem is NP Complete. The TSP is to find a route of minimum length L for visiting each of N cities on a map. NP Completeness says the best known algorithms still need time that is an exponential function of N. An approximation algorithm for TSP finds a route of length no more than cL for some fixed c > 1. For example, you can easily construct the minimum spanning tree of the cities in time that is a polynomial in N and walk around the tree, covering each edge twice, to obtain an approximatoin algorithm for the case c = 2. The implied goal is to find algorithms for constants c as close to one as possible.
An exact algorithm for compiling a program that produces correct results in minimum time from any given source code is - under reasonable assumptions - undecidable. Yet of course we use "optimizing compilers" every day that improve the speed of code with no promise of true optimality.
In optimization, there are two kinds of algorithms. Exact and approximate algorithms.
Exact algorithms can find the optimum solution with precision.
Approximate algorithms can find a near optimum solution.
The main difference is that exact algorithms apply in "easy" problems.
What makes a problem "easy" is that it can be solved in reasonable time and the computation time doesn't scale up exponentially if the problem gets bigger. This class of problems is known as P(Deterministic Polynomial Time). Problems of this class are used to be optimized using exact algorithms.
For every other class of problems approximate algorithms are preferred.
Is there any way to test an algorithm for perfect optimization?
There is no easy way to prove that any given algorithm is asymptotically optimal.
Proving optimality (if ever) sometimes follows years and/or decades after the algorithm has been written. A classic example is the Union-Find/disjoint-set data structure.
Disjoint-set forests are a data structure where each set is represented by a tree data structure, in which each node holds a reference to its parent node. They were first described by Bernard A. Galler and Michael J. Fischer in 1964, although their precise analysis took years.
[...] These two techniques complement each other; applied together, the amortized time per operation is only O(α(n)), where α(n) is the inverse of the function f(n) = A(n,n), and A is the extremely quickly-growing Ackermann function.
[...] In fact, this is asymptotically optimal: Fredman and Saks showed in 1989 that Ω(α(n)) words must be accessed by any disjoint-set data structure per operation on average.
For some algorithms optimality can be proven after very careful analysis, but generally speaking, there's no easy way to tell if an algorithm is optimal once it's written. In fact, it's not always easy to prove if the algorithm is even correct.
See also
Wikipedia/Matrix multiplication
The naive algorithm is O(N3), Strassen's is roughly O(N2.807), Coppersmith-Winograd is O(N2.376), and we still don't know what is optimal.
Wikipedia/Asymptotically optimal
it is an open problem whether many of the most well-known algorithms today are asymptotically optimal or not. For example, there is an O(nα(n)) algorithm for finding minimum spanning trees. Whether this algorithm is asymptotically optimal is unknown, and would be likely to be hailed as a significant result if it were resolved either way.
Practical considerations
Note that sometimes asymptotically "worse" algorithms are better in practice due to many factors (e.g. ease of implementation, actually better performance for the given input parameter range, etc).
A typical example is quicksort with a simple pivot selection that may exhibit quadratic worst-case performance, but is still favored in many scenarios over a more complicated variant and/or other asymptotically optimal sorting algorithms.
For those among us mortals that merely want to know if an algorithm:
reasonably works as expected;
is faster than others;
there is an easy step called 'benchmark'.
Pick up the best contenders in the area and compare them with your algorithm.
If your algorithm wins then it better matches your needs (the ones defined by
your benchmarks).