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Wiki to Help Solve Millennium Problems?
MattWhitworth writes "A new wiki has been set up over at QEDen to try to gather a community to solve the Millennium Problems. The problems are seven as yet unsolved mathematical problems that continue to vex researchers today. What do you think of this effort? Will gathering a community of people help solve problems such as P=NP, or do you think it requires a lot more than a semi-qualified community to approach the problem?"
Kofi Annan and Jeffrey Sachs set up a wiki to solve the Millennium Development Goals which mind-bogglingly manages to be even less successful.
English is easier said than done.
That's a simple one. The missing mass is vaporware from all the features that Microsoft was promising for Windows Vista and all the promises the Duke Nukem Forever will be released. Once Windows Vista is fully featured and Duke Nukem Forever is released, the equations should work correctly. The odds of that happening is... like a spaceship being swallowed by a large dog in space. :)
Of course in a Wiki, that's going to be the "P=np" article.
"The title of this article is incorrect..."
-merv.
The real>/i> question is, will this Wiki be able to reach its solutions in non-Polynomial time?
Let's combine the wiki with an infinite number of typing monkeys. Eventually one of them will type up a LaTeX file that the STOC or FOCS conference reviewers would accept as a solution finally disproving P=?NP.
>"Any scientist who cannot explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan"
nowadays that restriction has been relaxed, and the official requirement for grant proposals in the UK is that it should be able to be understood by "an interested 14 year old".
Aha! A charlatan!
http://www.bearnol.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Math/riema nn.htm
You forgot about the usual quota of nutters who will post endlessly that they've already solved the problems, but the mathematicians don't understand their genius, want to suppress their genius, or both. Aliens may or may not be involved. Woe be to the first person competent in the field who mistakenly rebuts said genius...as you will likely get to be the nutters singular obsessive object of hatred, held above all others. Your every utterance in the forum will demand the most vigourous (mostly ad homen) rebuttal. If you say the sky is blue, you will be told that you aren't competent to understand if the sky is blue or not. And you molest collies, so your opinion on the "blue sky problem" can't be regarded as credible. Might as well go tell your department head, university president, anyone whose name appears near yours in a Google search, to expect a flood of correspondence detailing in exquisite, though totally bonkers, detail how you are unfit to teach math to first graders, much less where you are. Your penchant for molesting collies will be implied in varying degrees of ernestness. Sounds like a peachy idea.