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I am certainly never one to question Donald Knuth on things in computer science, but I've always thought his opinion of P vs. NP an odd one, though he is certai

• napsterbr 9y ago
  You'll definitely enjoy this: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/papers/poll.pdf https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/papers/poll.pdf Edit: sorry, misread your comment, thought you were wondering what was Knuth's opinion. Still, I'll leave the link here, since it's a great read nonetheless
  • albertzeyer 9y ago
    For the lazy people, from that document: > Donald Knuth: (Retired from Stanford) It will be solved by either 2048 or 4096. I am currently somewhat pessimistic. The outcome will be the truly worst case scenario: namely that someone will prove “P=NP because there are only finitely many obstructions to the opposite hypothesis”; hence there will exists a polynomial time solution to SAT but we will never know its complexity!
• thomasahle 9y ago
  I think he just got tired of being asked the question and decided to start messing around.
  • bitexploder 9y ago
    His reasoning felt solid to me. Even if it turns out to be true it is unlikely to be useful, which is borne out by the lack of algorithms and research that have come close to cracking it, despite the effort of many.