Indentation hardness test, performed with either 3 gf or 9 gf loads, preceded the development of microhardness testers using traditional indenters. In 1925, Smith and Sandland of the UK developed an indentation test that employed a square-based pyramidal indenter made from diamond. They chose the pyramidal shape with an angle of 136° between opposite faces in order to obtain hardness numbers that would be as close as possible to Brinell hardness numbers for the specimen. The Vickers test has a great advantage of using one hardness scale to test all materials.The first reference to the Vickers indenter with low loads was made
Hardness of approximation polynomial time. In the early 1990s, with the development of PCP theory, it became clear that many more approximation problems were hard to approximate, and that (unless P = NP) many known approximation algorithms achieved the best possible approximation ratio. Hardness of approximation theory deals with studying the approximation threshold of such problems. For an example of an NP-hard optimization problem that is hard to approximate, see set cover. Hardness of approximation In computer science, hardness of approximation is a field that studies the algorithmic complexity of finding near-optimal solutions to optimization problems. Hardness of approximation complements the study of