On the complexity of reconfiguration problems

Takehiro Ito, Erik D. Demaine, Nicholas J.A. Harvey, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Martha Sideri, Ryuhei Uehara, Yushi Uno
2011 Theoretical Computer Science  
Reconfiguration problems arise when we wish to find a step-by-step transformation between two feasible solutions of a problem such that all intermediate results are also feasible. We demonstrate that a host of reconfiguration problems derived from NP-complete problems are PSPACE-complete, while some are also NP-hard to approximate. In contrast, several reconfiguration versions of problems in P are solvable in polynomial time.
doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2010.12.005 fatcat:l7sg6nwunbht7ib6cx6efaa6ma