Past exam of the computer science course of the University of Oxford / 2015 / Knowledge representation and reasoning / 3 / f / i

For polynomial-time many-one reductions, an unconditional example is the empty language:A procedure that rejects every input decides it in constant time, so it belongs to P and hence NP. It is not NP-hard: the nonempty formal language $\{0\}$ belongs to NP, but no many-one reduction $f$ can satisfyThe right-hand side is always false. Thus the hardness condition fails without assuming $\mathsf{P}\ne \mathsf{NP}$. Giving an ordinary nontrivial problem in P would not establish the requested separation unconditionally, because that would require excluding the possibility $\mathsf{P}=\mathsf{NP}$.