[gwern]

Could you be more specific about the fraud? Optimizing your code to use appropriate data structures, and using state reduction to remove symmetries and duplicate states seems like a perfectly cromulent way of reducing a problem to its true core, which may be small enough to bruteforce.

[master_yoda_1]

Claiming to solve np hard problem is a fraud. Just put optimizing code in title.

[throwaway81523]

> Claiming to solve np hard problem is a fraud.

Claiming to solve an np hard problem in polynomial time on all inputs would be either a fraud or a breakthrough. This is not such a claim. The algorithm is organized to perform well on many but not all inputs--its worst case is exponential time and it doesn't pretend to be otherwise. If you play chess against a chess engine like Stockfish, the exact same thing is going on, and in fact the algorithms involved are closely related to the one in the article.