Pancake Flipping Is Hard — NP Hard

mikejuk writes "French computer scientists have finally proved that sorting pancakes is hard — NP hard. No really — this isn't a joke. Well, it is slightly amusing but that's just because it is being presented as pancake flipping. The algorithm in question is sorting a permutation using prefix reversal — which is much easier to understand in terms of pancakes. Basically you have to sort a pancake stack by simply inserting your spatula and flipping the top part of the stack. We now know that if you can do the this in polynomial time then you have proved that P=NP."

Comments

Re:Solution?

[Erich]

Oh, I see. The problem is not that pancake flipping itself is hard, that determining the optimal pancake flipping algorithm for a stack is hard. That's believable.