Intractable problems are ones that are not easily dealt with because it would take too long to come up with an answer. Although it may sound esoteric, intractability is of great practical interest because a breakthrough in this area would have major ramifications for many different lines of research. For example, most cryptographic codes rely on the intractability of some problems, and a criminal who managed to come up with an efficient solution could have a field day decoding secrets and selling them, or—more simply—just making phoney bank transactions. We will look at these things in Part V—Cryptography.
Intractable problems are ones that are not easily dealt with because it would take too long to come up with an answer. Although it may sound esoteric, intractability is of great practical interest because a breakthrough in this area would have major ramifications for many different lines of research. For example, most cryptographic codes rely on the intractability of some problems, and a criminal who managed to come up with an efficient solution could have a field day decoding secrets and selling them, or—more simply—just making phoney bank transactions. We will look at these things in Part V—Cryptography.
CSUnplugged_OS_2015_v3.2.docx