Optimal Inapproximability Results for MAX-CUT and Other 2-variable CSPs? Subhash Khot† Guy Kindler School of Mathematics DIMACS Institute for Advanced Study Rutgers University Princeton, NJ Piscataway, NJ
[email protected] [email protected] Elchanan Mossel∗ Ryan O’Donnell† Department of Statistics School of Mathematics U.C. Berkeley Institute for Advanced Study Berkeley, CA Princeton, NJ
[email protected] [email protected] June 19, 2004 Preliminary version Abstract In this paper we give evidence that it is NP-hard to approximate MAX-CUT to within a factor of αGW +, for all > 0. Here αGW denotes the approximation ratio achieved by the Goemans-Williamson algorithm [22], αGW ≈ .878567. We show that the result follows from two conjectures: a) the Unique Games conjecture of Khot [33]; and, b) a very believable conjecture we call the Majority ∗Supported by a Miller fellowship in Computer Science and Statistics, U.C. Berkeley †This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under agree- ment Nos. DMS-0111298 and CCR-0324906 respectively. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Is Stablest conjecture. Our results suggest that the naturally hard “core” of MAX-CUT is the set of instances in which the graph is embedded on a high- dimensional Euclidean sphere and the weight of an edge is given by the squared distance between the vertices it connects. The same two conjectures also imply that it is NP-hard to (β+)-approximate 2 MAX-2SAT, where β ≈ .943943 is the minimum of (2 + π θ)/(3 − cos(θ)) on π ( 2 , π).