Combinatorial Optimization

Combinatorial Optimization is a category of problems which requires optimizing a function over a combination of discrete objects and the solutions are constrained. Examples include finding shortest paths in a graph, maximizing value in the Knapsack problem and finding boolean settings that satisfy a set of constraints. Many of these problems are NP-Hard, which means that no polynomial time solution can be developed for them. Instead, we can only produce approximations in polynomial time that are guaranteed to be some factor worse than the true optimal solution.

Source: Recent Advances in Neural Program Synthesis