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i spent years thinking about p vs np, under the same intution you have - i figured p must equal np. i even had it on my license plate: http://s3.neyer.me/pnp.
by MarkPNeyer 11y ago
i spent years thinking about p vs np, under the same intution you have - i figured p must equal np.
i even had it on my license plate:
http://s3.neyer.me/pnp.jpg http://s3.neyer.me/pnp.jpg
after nightmares involving np complete problems, i finally started considering that p didn't equal np, and suddenly the world made much more sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUD9fDxiWKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUD9fDxiWKs
- 1arity 11y agoI hope sometime you come back to the light. Stay strong.
- MarkPNeyer 11y agosee my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10074890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10074890 a world where P = NP is a much darker world.
- 1arity 11y agoDude, with all due respect, that's what the church said when the possibility was raised of the Earth not being the centre of the universe. "We cannae conceive how it can be bearable to be so" !==> "It can not be so"
- javert 11y agoThat license plate is just awesome.
- darkmighty 11y agoNice talk! I'm unsure about the excessive use of analogies. If you don't have a very precise isomorphism it can be unproductive, but the ones you've shown are cool. About your turnover on the PvsNP problem, did that have to do with realizing that approximations can be quite good for practical purposes? What's the current state of approximations in the field? I find it interesting because the only application I know where approximations are complete garbage is cryptography, or "adversarial" applications; is that right? In that case P!=NP yields the best of both words: we can build trapdoor functions for adversarial systems but still solve optimization problems well. I find that picture very convincing for some reason (exact solutions are hard, usable approximations are easy).