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Consequences of a Solution to NP Complete Problems?
m00nshyn3 asks: "If a person were to find a O(n) solution to an NP complete
problem, it would obviously be a great advance in computer science,
but what are the consequences of such a discovery? Would our most
popular implementations
of cryptography be useless overnight? It seems like there is a lot
of immediate damage that could occur if such a solution were found.
So if (when) the time comes, what is the responsible way for the
solution to be made public?" If you had such an algorithm in hand,
what could you do with it? It would be interesting to see how many
problems we could map into the NP Complete model.
Yum.
first #Us post
hot gritz
Consequences? Fuck, we won't really know what they are until it happens. Until then, you're *still* a dipshit.
Oh nevermind. That would only effect /.
first post 76666666
If we knew the answer to that, we'd already have the solution!
And shouldn't this be under Ask Slashdot?
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Of course you didn't know about them because the slashdot staff has absolute power. Any hint of accountability and fairness on this site is just an illusion.
once he was dead. yesterday he died. but today he is not living. what is he doing now? i have no clue. do you? i don't... do you?
I'd release it to the public, then sit down until they hand me my well-deserved Turing award.
Seriously, there are more advantages (quick solutions to complex problems, like the traveller salesman) than disadvantages (cracking easily certain encryption mechanisms) to this.
But then again, my gut feeling is that P!=NP.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
ich liebe furchte mösen
FP
If in Atlanta during rush hour on a bad traffic day.....
The Answer is to get out of the car and start walking, unless you are lucky enough to have one of them Segways. Then you can fall you way there, and there and there.
That compaired to having stayed in your car.... You did better then NP complete.
Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).
The other proposed 'solution', EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
I really don't know why I spent so much time responding to an obvious troll, but it seems the moderators don't agree with me.
Because you want so badly for them to agree with you. Guess what. They're gone now. This article is dead and the moderators have moved on to today's killings.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer