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Is it possible to design an efficient approximation algorithm for an $\sf{NP\text{-}complete}$ problem based on reductions from Shor's algorithm?

Are known any (classical) approximation algorithms for an $\sf{NP\text{-}complete}$ problem that uses Factoring as oracle?

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    $\begingroup$ While it might be possible, a deterrent to doing so would be that the true running time of the resulting approximation algorithm would be unknown (and it might not even be polynomial!) $\endgroup$ Mar 30, 2012 at 16:22
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    $\begingroup$ I think it is not known if Factoring is $\sf{P\text{-}hard}$, so the likely answer is none at the moment. $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh
    Mar 30, 2012 at 17:15
  • $\begingroup$ @Kaveh why do you say that? P-hardness is wrt logspace reductions. How are logspace reductions related to this question? $\endgroup$ May 17, 2015 at 7:26
  • $\begingroup$ @Sasho, this is from 3 years ago so I don't recall exactly, but I think I meant that we don't know how to do it for P so it is unlikely we know how to do it for NP. :) $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh
    May 17, 2015 at 7:31
  • $\begingroup$ @Kaveh Fair enough. Greg is digging out old questions :) $\endgroup$ May 17, 2015 at 8:28

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There are ways to see that either the answer is probably no, or that the question means more than one thing and has a negotiable answer. On the one hand, the PCP theorem says that many, but not all, NP-hard problems are still NP-hard to approximate. The standard belief is that Grover's search algorithm, which gives you a quadratic speedup but no more than that, is the best quantum algorithm for the hardest NP-hard problems. This leaves fairly little wiggle room to expect any quantum algorithm to have any special relation to approximation to NP-hard problems in general.

Some NP-hard problems are easier to approximate than the ones amenable to the PCP theorem. However, the difficulty of approximation is then highly variable.

Meanwhile Shor's algorithm does something very specific: It finds the period of a periodic function on the integers or on $\mathbb{Z}^n$. This problem is also in the complexity class SZK, for example. Maybe you could cook up an approximation problem to an NP-hard problem that lands you in SZK or period-finding, but I suspect that there aren't any known, natural examples of that.

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