Thanks but I am really interested in reading more about NP hardness in real world situations. Operations research may be a place to start but then my question becomes "Where does NP hardness arise in operations research?"
Here's an example of a creative way to interpret my original question: as xkcd implies, you might say eBay "solves" an NP hard problem http://xkcd.com/399/. Ebay doesn't solve the traveling salesman problem as it is normally posed in computer science, but it rephrased the problem statement in a useful way.
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Thanks but I am really interested in reading more about NP hardness in real world situations. Operations research may be a place to start but then my question becomes "Where does NP hardness arise in operations research?"
Here's an example of a creative way to interpret my original question: as xkcd implies, you might say eBay "solves" an NP hard problem http://xkcd.com/399/. Ebay doesn't solve the traveling salesman problem as it is normally posed in computer science, but it rephrased the problem statement in a useful way.