Algorithms and Complexity Group
  • People
  • Research
  • Courses
  • Talks
  • Jobs
  • Contact

Garey-Johnson Cartoon Updated

The Famous Cartoon

The 1979 textbook by Michael Garey and David S. Johnson “Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness” has been very influential and is one of the most cited books in computer science.

The book famously features a cartoon which depicts a researcher who reports to his boss and justifies why he didn’t succeed in carrying out a given task. With that scenario the cartoon illustrates how the method of NP-completeness can be used to resolve a famous predicament of computer science where for literally thousands of fundamental computational problems one can neither give an efficient algorithm, nor prove that such an algorithms doesn’t exist.

 

The Update

Here is a new and more contemporary version of the cartoon. Do you spot the difference?

Starting  with the current  2018 summer term, the new cartoon will be used  on lecture slides for the first-year algorithms course  at TU Wien.

The cartoon has been released by Stefan Szeider under the Creative Commons licence 4.0.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

News

  • Best Paper Award at SOFSEM 2025

    Best Paper Award at SOFSEM 2025

    2025-01-23
    Thomas Depian, Simon D. Fink, Alexander Firbas, Robert Ganian, and Martin Nöllenburg received the Best Paper Award for their paper …Read More »
  • Markus Wallinger receives Award of Excellence for his PhD Thesis

    Markus Wallinger receives Award of Excellence for his PhD Thesis

    2024-12-05
    Our former group member Markus Wallinger won the Award of Excellence by the Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research. …Read More »
  • Thomas Depian receives State Prize for his Master’s Thesis

    Thomas Depian receives State Prize for his Master’s Thesis

    2024-11-21
    Our group member Thomas Depian won the Appreciation Award given by the Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research. This …Read More »
  • Best Paper Award at GECCO 2024 for M. Bresich, G. Raidl, and S. Limmer

    Best Paper Award at GECCO 2024 for M. Bresich, G. Raidl, and S. Limmer

    2024-07-24
    Maria Bresich, Günther Raidl, and Steffen Limmer received the best paper award at the 2024 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference …Read More »
  • Welcome to our Feodor Lynen Fellow Dr. Frank Sommer

    Welcome to our Feodor Lynen Fellow Dr. Frank Sommer

    2024-06-14
    On June 1, 2024, Dr. Frank Sommer has joined the Algorithms and Complexity group with a prestigious Feodor Lynen postdoc …Read More »

News archive

All news for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
TU Wien Informatics
Offenlegung (§25 MedienG) Inhaber der Website ist das Institut für Logic and Computation an der Technischen Universität Wien, 1040 Wien. Die TU Wien distanziert sich von den Inhalten aller extern gelinkten Seiten und übernimmt diesbezüglich keine Haftung. – Disclaimer – Datenschutzerklärung
Log in requires cookies.