Ask YC: P = NP ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214762

by btw0 • 18 years ago

4 9 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What's your idea?

gaius• 18 years ago

N=1

jcl• 18 years ago

Or P=0

noodle• 18 years ago

P≠NP

xirium• 18 years ago

There's a huge financial incentive to solve this problem; it would significantly improve the efficiency of many business processes and it would make it trivial to crack many contemporary forms of encryption. The solution is worth billions, if not trillions. Furthermore, you've only got to find one example where P=NP and you can reduce many other problems to this case. Furthermore, there's a very large number of abstract and practical examples to work on. So why hasn't it been solved?

Has it been solved in secret? Are we not smart enough to solve the problem? Is there little incentive to prove that P!=NP? Do foolhardy attempts produce "good enough" improvements to existing practices?

dangoldin2• 18 years ago

I'm slowly working on it!

neilc• 18 years ago

Furthermore, you've only got to find one example where P=NP and you can reduce many other problems to this case

Except that the answer is quite likely P != NP. Rather than characterizing the rewards in financial terms, IMHO the more important thing to be gained is knowledge: the answer to a fundamental question in complexity theory (perhaps the fundamental open question).

dangoldin2• 18 years ago

If you can solve Minesweeper in polynomial time, you've got it.

http://www.claymath.org/Popular_Lectures/Minesweeper/

superchink• 18 years ago

Is this a serious question?

MaysonL• 18 years ago

nil

Ask YC: P = NP ?

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