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>>if you could verify the crucial piece of information, you wouldn't be torturing him in the first place. This is not true. There are many things easy to verif
by bluecalm 11y ago
>>if you could verify the crucial piece of information, you wouldn't be torturing him in the first place.
This is not true. There are many things easy to verify but difficult to discover. For example a place the money is kept in a big house.
- SilasX 11y agoYeah, I always hoped HN was the last place where you actually had to convince people that NP-complete problems exist...
- PepeGomez 11y agoReal world problems are often NP-hard, not NP-complete.
- saganus 11y agoWell yes. But I think the parent was framing it with reference to the intelligence world conflicts. At least that's how I Read it. Imagine you torture a guy to get the name of it's cell leader. You can't verify this easily. You have to capture that other guy, torture him and repeat the process. While in any of those steps you have the chance of getting false information without knowing it. I would think most intelligence from a war zone would be of this type, i.e. hard to verify, and I think the parent was thinking along those lines as well.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]