In the paper “THE COMPLEXITY OF SATISFIABILITY PROBLEMS” by Thomas J. Schaefer, the author has mentioned that
This raises the intriguing possibility of computer-assisted NP-completeness proofs. Once the researcher has established the basic framework for simulating conjunctions of clauses, the relational complexity could be explored with the help of a computer. The computer would be instructed to randomly generate various input configurations and test whether the defined relation was non-affine, non-bijunctive, etc.
Of course, this is a limitation:
The fruitfulness of such an approach remains to be proved: the enumeration of the elements of a relation on lO or 15 variables is Surely not a light computational task.
I am curious that
- Are there follow-up researches in developing this idea of “computer-assisted NP-completeness proofs”? What is the state-of-the-art (may be specific to $textsf{3SAT}$ or $textsf{3-Partition}$)?
Since Schaefer has proposed the idea of “computer-assisted” NP-Completeness proof (at least for reductions from $textsf{SAT}$), does this mean there are some general principles/structures underlying these reductions (for the ones from $textsf{3SAT}$ or $text{3-Partition}$)? If so, what are they?- Does anyone have experience in proving NP-completeness with a computer-assistant? Or can anyone make up an artificial example?