The Explainer: P vs. NP

Science and technology journalists pride themselves on the ability to explain complicated ideas in accessible ways, but there are some technical principles that we encounter so often in our reporting that paraphrasing them or writing around them begins to feel like missing a big part of the story. So in a new series of articles called "The Explainer," MIT News Office staff will explain some of the core ideas in the areas they cover, as reference points for future reporting on MIT research. In the 1995 Halloween episode of The Simpsons, Homer Simpson finds a portal to the mysterious Third Dimension behind a bookcase, and desperate to escape his in-laws, he plunges through. He finds himself wandering across a dark surface etched with green gridlines and strewn with geometric shapes, above which hover strange equations. One of these is the deceptively simple assertion that P = NP. In...

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