True, there is the engineering aspect, but I didn't mean that, I was talking about the same fundamental philosophical question you were. That is, "are there pr

True, there is the engineering aspect, but I didn't mean that, I was talking about the same fundamental philosophical question you were. That is, "are there problems for which we can easily verify a solution but not easily find one". P=?NP is only relevant to this philosophical question, if we accept that "polynomial" is synonymous with "easy". That is a widely accepted statement, but not entirely obvious. As it was said in the linked poll, even a polynomial running time could hide contants so large, that it is prohibitively large not just today but anytime in the future until the universe collapses upon itself. On the other hand there can be NP-hard problems for which we can find arbitrarily close approximations in reasonable time. The question is how well are our theoretical efforts capturing this intuition.