
Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP - robg
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/the-gdel-letter/
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Cushman
I like the personal touch you see in these old letters. It'd be nice to see
more technical blog posts/comments these days that open with a paragraph
asking after the recipient's health, and close with sincere best wishes and
congratulations for a recent success.

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thwarted
That would only make the use of TL;DR more appropriate.

Blog posts are rarely targeted at an individual, and those that are are often
written in a confrontational or sarcastic tone.

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Cushman
That's a fair point-- and exactly what I'm talking about.

This idea that it's a waste of time to write or read anything nice about
someone else is a cancer on our community.

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thwarted
Considering the quality of the average blog post, this would only serve to
decrease the signal to noise ratio, especially when what is actually the meat
of many posts are already so devoid of useful content.

I notice that you didn't start your response with concern about my health nor
wished me well on my future endeavors in your sign off.

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cgs1019
This thread seems possessed of an almost Gödelian self-referentiality.

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jfb
I liked this very much. A letter between two of the towering intellects of the
modern age that is still so accessible and packed with information puts all
those fucking content-free PowerPoint info sinks right in their goddamned
place.

I also appreciated that it wasn't walled off in scribd or something. I was
able to, you know, read the text in a relaxing and "natural" manner.

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thisisnotmyname
This sounds to me like what we now call the Busy Beaver problem.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver>

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bdr
It's not. Godel is asking, what's the fastest program that can tell if a
(first order predicate logic) formula is provable?

Maybe you were confused by the 'max', but what he's doing is defining the
complexity of the prover by the hardest (max computational time) formula
instance for each length n. You still try to handle that maximum difficulty
case as efficiently as possible, it just happens to take the longest.

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ctkrohn
For what it's worth, Lipton writes an excellent blog. It had very good
coverage of the Deolalikar P=NP question, and continues to be interested even
to those of us without a theoretical computer science background. Well worth
adding to your RSS.

