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NotOscarWilde • yesterday at 11:24 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

As a TCS/scheduling person, this one is definitely of lesser importance than UGC, but it has been an open problem since the book of Garey and Johnson in 1979:

A Polynomial-Time Algorithm for Three-Machine Unit-Job Scheduling [1]

Since some people talk about small numbers that pop up in integer multiplication results, here a completely different number appears:

Theorem 1.1. Let an explicitly listed finite directed acyclic graph specify the precedence constraints on n >= 1 nonpreemptive unit-length jobs on three identical machines. There is a uniform deterministic algorithm that constructs a feasible schedule of minimum makespan. Given also an integer deadline 1 <= T <= n, it decides feasibility exactly and returns a schedule whenever the answer is affirmative. Both tasks can be performed in O((L + 2)^150020) steps on a deterministic multitape Turing machine, where L is the total binary input length.

That is some crazy exponent -- plus an interestingly old computational model to boot; not something that is natural to most of us. I have no capacity to check its correctness today, but I hope it is true purely for the exponent.

[1]: https://github.com/openai/math/blob/main/preprints/A-polynom...