This Is Getting Complex – IOTW Report

This Is Getting Complex

Monday, 21 August 2023, 22:15 Dr. Tar Uncategorized 27

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Today, even seasoned researchers find understanding in short supply when they confront the central open question in theoretical computer science, known as the P versus NP problem. In essence, that question asks whether many computational problems long considered extremely difficult can actually be solved easily (via a secret shortcut we haven’t discovered yet), or whether, as most researchers suspect, they truly are hard. At stake is nothing less than the nature of what’s knowable.

Despite decades of effort by researchers in the field of computational complexity theory — the study of such questions about the intrinsic difficulty of different problems — a resolution to the P versus NP question has remained elusive. And it’s not even clear where a would-be proof should start. More

27 Comments on This Is Getting Complex

  21. Thanks Dr. Tar, an interesting read.

    I read Hofsteader’s book (Gödel, Escher, Bach) back in the 70s when I was in high school. It emphasized that meaningless choices can lead one to predictable results, and that expanded my view of life in general.

    However, I’m a product of my environment, and that environment made anyone who thought about things an outcast, so I joined the Army, got a meager degree in Computer Science, and spent the next 30 years attempting to be average but tearing down anyone that stood in my way. 😀 I’m pretty fucking proud of spring to the Pinnacle of Underachievement

    I can only hope these concepts which will obviously be used to augment AI will be used responsibly, hopefully to guide people to make the choice of free thinking and liberty, as opposed to corruption, ignorance and slavery. Thanks.

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  22. Brad AT 12:08 AM
    “There’s no discipline in shit anymore, this is what happens when theoretical peeps suddenly think they’re practical. Go home. You’re drunk.”

    …agreed. I’m in a field that colleges always get grants to overthink, and they come up with crap that maybe works in small batches in a lab with unstressed, grant-funded interns working with brand-new equipment over lattes without having to worry about regulations or inspections or ESL speakers or the busload of crack addicts the company hired for cheap actually OPERATING i, and come up with crap that never works in ton after ton in real-world imperfect conditions, or is wildly expensive, impractical, or done in a way that doesn’t lend itself to producing mass quantities. This is where stuff comes from like high pressure processing, where 87,000 PSI is used to “squash the bugs” and also REALLY find out on EVERY CYCLE if your pressure vessel, valves, and controls are any good; radiation processing where your folks wheel carts into a room then expose them to an intense radiation source, after which no one buys it because people will NOT buy irradiated food; and microwave processing, which is cool but VERY complex and expensive and completely impractical for use by semiskilled labor that most food plants can afford and also uses humongously expensive parts that are hard to get and LOTS of them, and on and on and on…

    …we did this one using existing technology once with heavy, trayed foods packed tightly in a rotational retort that a college had ASSUR9ED the Gummit that would lessen process times, and they spent gobs of tax money on it. The configuration prevented heat penetration, so we had to pay people to put hundreds of spacers in trays, only to find the rotation destroyed the now-overspaced containers. Other iterations were tried, but long story short they ended up with no benefit and the gubmint paid to remove all project assets thereafter, benefitting no one but whoever got the grant money.

    There’s tons of examples like this. The lab is not real life and college kids have NO real life experiences, so you end up with ridiculous, poorly executed crap like THIS.

    https://iotwreport.com/university-sues-after-janitor-allegedly-destroyed-decades-of-research-by-turning-off-beeping-freezer/

    …to Brad’s point, only OCCASIONALLY can the theoretical serve the practical. It is FAR more common that it is just a way to give tax money to Communist perfessers and institutions so they can do busy work and get richly rewarded by taxpayers who have no say in it, so the useless can further their agenda of bleeding the useful dry, and use the proceeds to fund BLM 101 in the next room over…

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  26. So Razborov and Rudich’s result showed that any natural proof of P ≠ NP would also yield a fast algorithm that could distinguish pseudorandom strings containing hidden messages from truly random ones. Secure cryptography would be impossible — precisely the opposite of what researchers hoped to establish by proving P ≠ NP.

    On the other hand, if secure cryptography is possible, then natural proofs aren’t a viable strategy for proving P ≠ NP — a prerequisite for secure cryptography. That’s the natural proofs barrier in a nutshell. It seemed as if complexity theorists were on the receiving end of a cruel joke.

    HAHAHAHAAAHAAAHAAAHAHAHA!

    Um, er, what’s that punchline again and what does it really mean?

    “If you believe in hardness, then you should believe that it’s hard to prove hardness,” Kabanets said.

    Well, duh.

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