paulfchristiano comments on What can you do with an Unfriendly AI? - Less Wrong

16 Post author: paulfchristiano 20 December 2010 08:28PM

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Comment author: paulfchristiano 20 December 2010 09:20:18PM 0 points [-]

Of course you're both right. In my defense, there is a strong theoretical connection between undecidability and not being in P.

In general, there is probably no reasonably short proof, that an arbiter would have time to verify, that a purported proof of the Riemann hypothesis is the shortest. This is independent of how smart the genie is.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 20 December 2010 11:34:35PM 0 points [-]

there is probably no reasonably short proof, that an arbiter would have time to verify, that a purported proof of the Riemann hypothesis is the shortest.

Agree ("probably"). Would be interesting if there were a proof from complexity theory or elsewhere that it's expensive to compute in some sense. That we can't imagine a method is different from a proof that there can't be one (for proving some general class of "hard to prove/disprove" statements like RH; obviously there's a constant answer to "shortest proof of a fixed claim").

Comment author: paulfchristiano 21 December 2010 01:44:09AM 1 point [-]

If you replace Riemann hypothesis by "any provable mathematical statement" and you allow arbitrary verification procedures instead of just the normal mathematical ones, then the question is probably equivalent to P = coNP, which is equivalent to P = NP.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 21 December 2010 02:00:59AM *  0 points [-]

I assume you're thinking of this - P=coNP => polytime decision for propositional tautologies (but not for mixed quanitifier bool. formulas). It's CoNP-complete to decide tautologies (implicit forall for all the prop. vars) and NP-complete to decide satisfiability (implicit exists for all the prop. vars).

I don't understand what you mean by "arbitrary verification procedures" - maybe you're talking about a different result than the one I linked above?

P = coNP, which is equivalent to P = NP.

Right - those are equivalent.