Example problems not in P nor in NP-complete but in NP
There is no problem known to be in
NP \ NPC
.A problem is in NP if and only if a non-deterministic turing machine can solve it in polynomial time (or, equivalently, a deterministic turing machine can decide it in polynomial time). This is not the case for your example.
Further it should be pointed out that we do not know whether
P = NP
, so it's perfectly possible (if highly unlikely) that all problems inNP
can be solved in polynomial time. So if we know that a problem can not be solved in polynomial time, that problem is either not in NP or, if we can prove that it is indeed in NP, we just showed thatNP != P
.
Qiaochu Yuan, What techniques exist to show that a problem is not NP-complete?,
might help.
- BQP problems such as integer factorization and discrete logarithm (cracking RSA and DSA) are thought to be outside of P and are also suspected to be in NP but not in NP-complete. Integer factorization is known to be in NP, and is supposed to be outside of P and NP-complete.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization
- NP is a subset of EXPTIME, but it is expected that NP != EXPTIME (that is, EXPTIME-complete problems are not in NP). Like with P = NP, this is not yet proven (but it is known that P != EXPTIME). For example checking if an algorithm would half after k steps is EXPTIME-complete. Finding the power set is too (obviously).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXPTIME
I'd like to know an example of a problem that is neither in P, neither in NP-complete, but in NP.
Me too; if you find one go ahead and visit this web page to claim your $1M prize: https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/p-vs-np-problem