how do you prove that SAT is NP-complete?

Question

As it is, how do you prove that SAT is NP-complete?

I know what it means by NP-complete, so I do not need an explanation on that.

What I want to know is how do you know that one problem, such as SAT, is NP-complete without resorting to reduction to other problems such as hamiltonian problem or whatever.

Answer 1

I believe 3-SAT was originally reduced from the more general SATISFIABILITY in Karp's paper that outlined 21 NP-complete problems.

Wikipedia has a description of how to show that SATISFIABILITY is NP-complete, a result that's known as the Cook-Levin theorem. The idea of this proof is to show that any polynomial time nondeterministic Turing machine can be modeled as a boolean expression with polynomial size. The boolean expression has terms to represent the valid configuration space of the Turing machine: where the tape head is, what the current state is, what symbols are written on the tape, and what transitions are valid at every position. Because the NTM will halt in polynomial time, the configuration space is bounded and we can make a (large) polynomial expression to represent it.