6 ms·

Why do we think this is worthy of voting up? Is there any reason to think it might be correct?

• monochromatic 16y ago
  It's on the arXive, so you know it's legit.
  • jey 16y ago
    Sarcasm, right? The arXiv has very little quality control (intentionally).
    • roel_v 16y ago
      I think the point was that quite a bit of what is on arXiv is from quacks and nutcases. (maybe not the majority, or even a large part - but enough to cast some shadow over arXiv itself, and therefore over other submissions as well).
  • zitterbewegung 16y ago
    Just because its on arXiv doesn't mean its legitimate. Its more likely that it is legitimate if it gets published (with a few exceptions like the Poincaré conjecture.
    • nandemo 16y ago
      http://www.sarcasmsociety.com/irony/howtorecognizeirony http://www.sarcasmsociety.com/irony/howtorecognizeirony
      • JadeNB 16y ago
        Yeah, like that will work.
  • deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
• tzs 16y ago
  Failure can be interesting. Consider the attempt a few months ago by Deolalikar. The ensuing public discussion, which including many big names in complexity theory and at least one Fields medallist, was very enlightening. This particular attempt involves someone claiming P=NP, and they have code. Even people who aren't complexity theorists can jump in on this one, by analyzing the code to verify it really is in P, and by trying to find problem instances it fails on.
  • celoyd 16y ago
    at least one Fields medallist I think both Gowers and Tao talked about it. I don’t remember in how much depth.
• azakai 16y ago
  It is almost certainly not correct, simply because so many have tried, and none succeeded. However, this guy seems very cool - he is humble about his work, appears very serious, and even puts his code on github. And even if wrong, his approach might be interesting.
  • vilda 16y ago
    "because so many have tried, and none succeeded" Words worth of a politician, but not a hacker!
    • tomjen3 16y ago
      No words worthy of a Hacker - we are bound by reality. Politicians are not.
      • mikemol 16y ago
        Our actions are bound by reality. Our choices are bound by what we posit reality to be.
• lwat 16y ago
  We just want to know what the flaw in his reasoning is.
• cyrus_ 16y ago
  It looks like the paper is fairly straightforward. It purports to give a polynomial time algorithm for 3-SAT. Interesting facts: - It is a O(n^4m) algorithm, where n is the number of boolean variables and m is the number of disjunctions. - It not only tells you whether the formula is satisfiable or not, but gives you the satisfying values. - The author claims to have implemented and tested the algorithm on reasonably sized problems, though I don't see his code posted anywhere (?). Someone else appears to have implemented it here: https://github.com/anjlab/sat3 https://github.com/anjlab/sat3. - The author references no prior work, just review papers on the problem itself.
  • deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  • wnoise 16y ago
    > - It not only tells you whether the formula is satisfiable or not, but gives you the satisfying values. Any yes/no NP solver can be turned into one that does this with polynomial overhead. After finding there is a solution, you ask it the similar problem "does this have solution with the first bit set to true?", then "does this have a solution with the first bit set to <answer to previous question> and the second bit set to true?", and so forth until you've identified all bits.