JoshuaZ comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 01 August 2010 01:27PM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 09 August 2010 12:04:49AM *  2 points [-]

There's a very good summary by Scott Aaronson describing why we believe that P is very likely to be not equal to NP. However, Clippy's confidence seems unjustified. In particular, there was a poll a few years ago that showed that a majority of computer scientists believe that P=NP but a substantial fraction do not. (The link was here but seems to be not functioning at the moment (according to umd.edu's main page today they have a scheduled outage of most Web services for maintenance so I'll check again later. I don't remember the exact numbers so I can't cite them right now)).

This isn't precisely my area, but speaking as a mathematician whose work touches on complexity issues, I'd estimate around a 1/100 chance that P=NP.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 09 August 2010 05:17:17AM 1 point [-]

URL is repeated twice in link?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 09 August 2010 01:45:33PM 0 points [-]

Thanks, fixed.