An Average Case NP-Complete Graph Coloring Problem

NP-complete problems should be hard on some instances but those may be extremely rare. On generic instances many such problems, especially related to random graphs, have been proven easy. We show the intractability of random instances of a graph coloring problem: this graph problem is hard on average unless all NP problem under all samplable (i.e., generatable in polynomial time) distributions are easy. Worst case reductions use special gadgets and typically map instances into a negligible fraction of possible outputs. Ours must output nearly random graphs and avoid any super-polynomial distortion of probabilities. This poses significant technical difficulty.