The syntacticians' hotel

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… or possibly the computational complexity theorists'. In any case, the NP Hotel (also known as the N.P. Hotel), on 6th Ave. S. in Seattle:


This is a recent photo, but the sign on the side of the building is of some vintage; you can't expect to find a room there for 50 cents. In fact, it's not a hotel now, but low-income housing (renovated, along with a number of other hotels in the International District, in the 1970s), so it's properly referred to as the "NP Hotel building". The building is in a historically Japanese section of the city, and there's now a Japanese restaurant (Maneki) in the building.

The NP in NP Hotel doesn't stand for Noun Phrase, or for that matter Nondeterministic Polynomial. It's the Northern Pacific Hotel, a railway hotel built in 1914. Nevertheless, I like to think of it as a place where you can get a first-class noun phrase for only 50 cents.

(Hat tip to Ann Burlingham and Jason Parker-Burlingham.)

[In e-mail, Jason Parker-Burlingham suggests another virtue of the NP Hotel — "it's the perfect place for a traveling salesman to stay while he carefully repacks a knapsack" — alluding to two NP-complete problems, the Knapsack Problem and the Traveling Salesman Problem.]



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