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by andrewla 761 days ago
And the converse as well -- an algorithm that is 10,000,000 * n^17 is going to be effectively intractable but falls neatly into P.

And the reality is that most NP-complete problems are well-solved by heuristics except in strange combinatorial corners. It's why we can't just create encryption systems based on knowing the correct answer to an NP-complete problem; most of the problem instances will be too easy to solve.