= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
apophenia comments on A Request for Open Problems - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (104)
Scott Aaronson and many others in his field have essentially bet their careers that P ≠ NP (at least, I think the whole hierarchy of complexity classes would collapse if P = NP), while only a bunch of cranks (so far as I've heard) have bet a substantial amount of their life's efforts on P = NP. That's as good a statement of betting odds as any.
As for whether it's legitimate to do so, well, that's Bayesian probability for you. You've got to have some way of dealing with subjective uncertainty, and you get better results in the long run if your method of dealing with it is like unto the laws of probability.
And, mid-2010, Scott Aaronson also literally put down a large bet that P != NP.
If you're thinking of this, you're misremembering -- that bet (of $200,000) was that Vinay Deolalikar's recent P != NP paper would not win the Clay Millenium prize. (In the comments, Aaronson says "P≠NP is exactly the ‘expected’ answer!"; the bet was his way of keeping people from accusing him of rushing to judgment when he said that he didn't think the paper would turn out to successfully prove that expected answer even though he hadn't read the whole thing.)
Ah, you're entirely right. I didn't misremember--I read his blog rather religiously. I just apparently wasn't quite awake when I wrote what he was betting on.
I should also clarify that he didn't have anyone matching even a lesser amount in the case that the paper was indeed unsuccessful (which it appears to be as it stands, but Aaronson's bet gives it a while to correct problems). His goal, which didn't exactly work, was to get people to stop asking him about the paper. I say it didn't work, because he probably got even more people commenting on the bet, and still a large number asking about the paper.