

Ask YC: P = NP ? - btw0

What's your idea?
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xirium
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?

~~~
neilc
_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).

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

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

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gaius
N=1

~~~
jcl
Or P=0

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noodle
P≠NP

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superchink
Is this a serious question?

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MaysonL
nil

