
The most amazing theoretical result in computer science (you will find it hard to believe!) - amichail
http://www.scribd.com/doc/25200/nature06
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michelson01
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/25200/nature06>

scribd link, via slurping (www.scribd.com/slurp?url=...)

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Elfan
The slurping is very cool. But flash isn't any less annoying than a pdf
viewer.

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eli
I disagree. Flash is much leaner and doesn't insist on searching online for
udates every time it's run.

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Elfan
You don't need to use Acrobat to view pdfs.

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neilk
Could this have any practical application to software testing?

If there is any analogy here, perhaps one could transmute a program into
something that crashed or failed more immediately if it was buggy. Of course
even if that worked, one might not be able to trace the failure back to an
actual line of code; it's not clear that this "smearing" process preserves
information like that.

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rms
I watched too much TV as a child and now I have a really short attention span.
Could you summarize this, please?

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aston
Basically, given a proof P of a statement expressed in n bits, you can in
polynomial time with respect to n create a new PCP proof Q which spreads out
(somehow?) P, including the errors in P. Since the errors are spread out, with
high probability, you'll catch an error choosing a very small number of bits
of Q.

It's like MAGIC... Especially since they don't explain it at all in the
article.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCP_theorem>

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dfranke
Hmm. According to that, the theorem applies to propositional logic.
Propositional logic is a very weak system; I don't think it can state the
Riemann hypothesis.

Edit: I take that back: propositional logic _definitely can't_ state the
Riemann hypothesis. PropLog is complete, which means that by Goedel's
incompleteness theorem it can't even model the natural numbers, much less the
complexes.

