The partition problem is: given a set of numbers, find a partition to two subsets in which the difference between the sums in each subset is minimized. This optimization problem is NP-hard. The simple exact algorithm - checking all the possible partitions - takes time $O(n 2^n)$. Is there a more efficient exact algorithm?
NOTE: If the numbers are small integers, then it can be solved by a pseudo-polynomial algorithm, but I am interested in a problem with real numbers (e.g. "double"s in Java).
