3 questions: P vs. NP
On Friday, Aug. 6, a mathematician at HP Labs named Vinay Deolalikar sent an e-mail to a host of other researchers with a 103-page attachment that purported to answer the most important outstanding question in computer science. That question is whether P = NP, and answering it will earn you $1 million from the Clay Mathematics Institute. Last fall, MIT News published a fairly detailed explanation of what P = NP means. But roughly speaking, P is a set of relatively easy problems, NP is a set of incredibly hard problems, and if they’re equal, then a large number of computer science problems that seem to be incredibly hard are actually relatively easy. Problems in NP include the factoring of large numbers, the selection of an optimal route for a traveling salesman, and the so-called 3-SAT problem, in which you must find values that satisfy triplets of logical conditions. For...