4 ms·

My point is stormtroopers:empire::UP:P You're correct that stormtroopers will never hit, wrong that stormtroopers are representative of the empire, and wrong a

My point is stormtroopers:empire::UP:P You're correct that stormtroopers will never hit, wrong that stormtroopers are representative of the empire, and wrong about the correlation between stormtrooper hits and empire hits, because you're ignoring higher order effects (eg, while stormtroopers always miss, the empire must hit something to be the "bad guy" -- and they do: Luke's parents, Alderaan, Obi-Wan, Hoth, Luke's arm, etc. But purely from the existence of stormtroopers consistently missing, you can infer there's a Darth Vader that must score some hits, or the plot wouldn't work. I think we might be in a similar case for P ?= NP, and you're all way too blasse predicting from stormtroopers. Very little research has been done on P - UP, where UP is all polynomials with degree less than 10,000 and coefficients less than 10^100. In fact, I don't know a single P-UP algorithm that wasn't explicitly constructed to be -- do you? I just think most of us are subtly talking about UP, not P. (Including the blog post.) And that you've incorrectly inferred a "plot" when all you've observed is "redshirt fire".

rocqua 9y ago
UP is much harder to deal with for a very simple reason. Composition of polynomials is still polynomial. Composition of polynomials of low degree leads to polynomials with high degree. You keep assuming we only look at UP, whereas actually our theoretical work explicitly looks at P. Often, we don't even care about actual efficiency of the algorithm. The constants might be astronomical, but we still like the algorithm for its asymptotic properties. I'm not versed in recent research, but I imagine the composition argument above often leads to polynomial performance with stupid degrees. I expect people only compute the actual degree when they thing it might be low. Again though, this is not my field of research.

rocqua 9y ago

UP is much harder to deal with for a very simple reason. Composition of polynomials is still polynomial. Composition of polynomials of low degree leads to polynomials with high degree. You keep assuming we only look at UP, whereas actually our theoretical work explicitly looks at P. Often, we don't even care about actual efficiency of the algorithm. The constants might be astronomical, but we still like the algorithm for its asymptotic properties. I'm not versed in recent research, but I imagine the composition argument above often leads to polynomial performance with stupid degrees. I expect people only compute the actual degree when they thing it might be low. Again though, this is not my field of research.