3 ms·

Somebody should tell DHL and USPS that they should shut down their businesses because TSP and CTP are unsolvable. Nah, you’re just wrong because good enough so

Somebody should tell DHL and USPS that they should shut down their businesses because TSP and CTP are unsolvable. Nah, you’re just wrong because good enough solutions are easy to find, nobody cares about 100% optimal.

VHRanger 5y ago
It's not even NP-Hard, it's PSPACE-hard. Try finding the shortest path to a network where you only discover the edges once you reach a node. You only get hilariously suboptimal solutions Which is why in practice such a system has to be centralized (eg. El Salvador) or it's effectively useless (you resort to opening a new channel rather than passing the money along an unknowable list of channels)
- keymone 5y ago
  you're overthinking it. and in the meantime LN works great. your analysis is obviously wrong somewhere, but your ideological position prevents you from accepting that fact and re-evaluating your assumptions. again: LN doesn't need to optimally solve np-hard or worse problems to work, good-enough approximations are easy to find.
  - VHRanger 5y ago
    It works great at tiny scales between small cliques of people who know each other. And it has for years. But it can't and never will work at large network sizes without being centralized. And no amount of development work will fix that, because it's a core design flaw. Which is why the meme with LN was "its 18 months away from wherever you are in time". It's always in early stages, because it can only achieve early stage levels of usability without devolving into a centralized system. By design.
    - keymone 5y ago
      > Which is why the meme with LN was "its 18 months away from wherever you are in time". yeah, if memes are the way you keep yourself informed on the topic then i totally understand your point of view. the reality is that LN works and what you call "small cliques" are just subnets that route payments internally efficiently but are also able to route externally when the need arises. this is literally how distributed systems are scaled, internet being the largest one. it would be centralized if nobody could use LN if some one or two largest nodes failed, but the protocol is open and everybody can open a channel with everybody else and nodes in the middle have no way to censor traffic because they don't know neither the sender nor the receiver. you're simply misinformed.
      - VHRanger 5y ago
        The internet maintains the very centralized BGP to solve routability Again, either you centralize or you keep having it be a toy
        keymone 5y ago
        removing any big LN node will cause disruption only to the channels directly opened with that node, but will largely be unnoticed by the rest of the network. so unless you point out the centers without which LN collapses, your claims are just bogus.

VHRanger 5y ago

It's not even NP-Hard, it's PSPACE-hard. Try finding the shortest path to a network where you only discover the edges once you reach a node. You only get hilariously suboptimal solutions Which is why in practice such a system has to be centralized (eg. El Salvador) or it's effectively useless (you resort to opening a new channel rather than passing the money along an unknowable list of channels)

keymone 5y ago
you're overthinking it. and in the meantime LN works great. your analysis is obviously wrong somewhere, but your ideological position prevents you from accepting that fact and re-evaluating your assumptions. again: LN doesn't need to optimally solve np-hard or worse problems to work, good-enough approximations are easy to find.
- VHRanger 5y ago
  It works great at tiny scales between small cliques of people who know each other. And it has for years. But it can't and never will work at large network sizes without being centralized. And no amount of development work will fix that, because it's a core design flaw. Which is why the meme with LN was "its 18 months away from wherever you are in time". It's always in early stages, because it can only achieve early stage levels of usability without devolving into a centralized system. By design.
  - keymone 5y ago
    > Which is why the meme with LN was "its 18 months away from wherever you are in time". yeah, if memes are the way you keep yourself informed on the topic then i totally understand your point of view. the reality is that LN works and what you call "small cliques" are just subnets that route payments internally efficiently but are also able to route externally when the need arises. this is literally how distributed systems are scaled, internet being the largest one. it would be centralized if nobody could use LN if some one or two largest nodes failed, but the protocol is open and everybody can open a channel with everybody else and nodes in the middle have no way to censor traffic because they don't know neither the sender nor the receiver. you're simply misinformed.
    - VHRanger 5y ago
      The internet maintains the very centralized BGP to solve routability Again, either you centralize or you keep having it be a toy
      - keymone 5y ago
        removing any big LN node will cause disruption only to the channels directly opened with that node, but will largely be unnoticed by the rest of the network. so unless you point out the centers without which LN collapses, your claims are just bogus.