15-453 Formal Languages, Automata, and Computation
Lecture 34: The Importance of SAT

This lecture is given by Mihai Budiu.

This lecture tries to convey the following messages:

SAT is a very important problem not only from a theoretical p.o.v, but also from a practical one.
Many real-life optimization problems are NP-hard. Having a quick solution for SAT would solve them all.
NP-complete problems are worst-case hard.
If NP=P, there is no cryptography.
Cryptography uses problems which are not known to be NP-complete; they must be hard on average.
We know very simple algorithms which can solve easy instances of SAT quickly.