Design Is as Easy as Optimization

Deeparnab Chakrabarty, Aranyak Mehta, Vijay V. Vazirani

Abstract: We identify a new genre of algorithmic problems – design problems – and study them from an algorithmic and complexity-theoretic view point. We use the learning techniques of Freund-Schapire [FS99] and its generalizations to show that for a large class of problems, the design version is as easy as the optimization version.