Construction of an NP Problem with an Exponential Lower Bound

In this paper we present a Hashed-Path Traveling Salesperson Problem (HPTSP), a new type of problem which has the interesting property of having no polynomial time solutions. Next we show that HPTSP is in the class NP by demonstrating that local information about sub-routes is insufficient to compute the complete value of each route. As a consequence, via Ladner's theorem, we show that the class NPI is non-empty.