A standard method for getting lower bounds of complexity consists of reducing a problem to another problem. More precisely, suppose that one may encode a problem of size into a subproblem of size of a problem , and that the complexity of is <math>\Omega(g(n)).</math> Without loss of generality, one may suppose that the function increases with and has an inverse function . Then the complexity of the problem is <math>\Omega(g(h(n))).</math> This is this method that is used for proving that, if P ≠ NP (an unsolved conjecture), the complexity of every NP-complete problem is <math>\Omega(n^k),</math> for every positive integer . | A standard method for getting lower bounds of complexity consists of reducing a problem to another problem. More precisely, suppose that one may encode a problem of size into a subproblem of size of a problem , and that the complexity of is <math>\Omega(g(n)).</math> Without loss of generality, one may suppose that the function increases with and has an inverse function . Then the complexity of the problem is <math>\Omega(g(h(n))).</math> This is this method that is used for proving that, if P ≠ NP (an unsolved conjecture), the complexity of every NP-complete problem is <math>\Omega(n^k),</math> for every positive integer . |