Blake canonical form

Selecting a minimal sum from a Blake canonical form amounts in general to solving the set cover problem,[5] so is NP-hard.

[6][7] Archie Blake presented his canonical form at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society in 1932,[8] and in his 1937 dissertation.

[15][clarification needed] Blake discussed three methods for calculating the canonical form: exhaustion of implicants, iterated consensus, and multiplication.

The iterated consensus method was rediscovered[1] by Edward W. Samson and Burton E. Mills,[16] Willard Quine,[17] and Kurt Bing.

[18][19] In 2022, Milan Mossé, Harry Sha, and Li-Yang Tan discovered a near-optimal algorithm for computing the Blake canonical form of a formula in conjunctive normal form.

Karnaugh map of A B + BC + AC , a sum of all prime implicants (each rendered in a different color). Deleting AC results in a minimal sum.