Clique problem 分团问题
In computer science, the clique problem refers to computational problems of finding cliques (subsets of vertices, all adjacent to each other, also called complete subgraphs) in a graph.
For example, the maximum clique problem arises in the following real-world setting. Consider a social network, where the graph’s vertices represent people, and the graph’s edges represent mutual acquaintance. To find a largest subset of people who all know each other, one can systematically inspect all subsets, a process that is too time-consuming to be practical for social networks comprising more than a few dozen people. Although this brute-force search can be improved by more efficient algorithms, all of these algorithms take exponential time to solve the problem. Therefore, much of the theory about the clique problem is devoted to identifying special types of graph that admit more efficient algorithms, or to establishing the computational difficulty of the general problem in various models of computation. Along with its applications in social networks, the clique problem also has many applications in bioinformatics and computational chemistry.