Checking for optimal solutions in some NP-complete problems.

For some weighted NP-complete problems, checking whether a proposed solution is optimal is a nontrivial task. Such is the case for the traveling salesman problem, or the spin-glass problem in three dimensions. In this Letter, we consider the weighted tripartite matching problem, a well known NP-complete problem. We write mean-field finite temperature equations for this model and derive their zero temperature limit. We show that any solution of the zero temperature equations provides an exact absolute ground state of the system. As a consequence, we propose a criterion which can be checked in polynomial time, and such that given a putative optimal solution, if the criterion is satisfied, then the solution is indeed optimal. This criterion is generalized to a class of variants of the multiple traveling salesmen problems.