Slashdot Mirror
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?"
3/4 of the people will argue about their misunderstanding of the problems involved, the other won't even know what the problems are but think they do. The very few people who actually do understand the problems and the underlying issues will eventually stop trying to explain what the real issue is.
Wiki to be created to solve Grand Unified Theory of Everything, this will take over because physicists, chemists, mathematicians have failed to do it, so the idea is to lob it out there. First step will be to resolve the problems between gravity and quantum mechanics.
Lets put it this way, if there was a Wiki on solving complex DNA evolution problems, 50%+ of the posts would be from wackos talking about ID and Creationism.
I hate to break it to people, but Maths and Physics make computing look like a liberal arts degree.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
If you have something significant towards a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, surely you're going to publish that in a peer-reviewed journal, not throw it online in a wiki. I'm not sure what the incentive is for mathematicians to use this.
I think ideas like this should definitely be encouraged. Personally, I don't think a band of semi-qualified people will be able to accomplish much. These problems require a very deep knowledge of mathematics to understand and appreciate them, let alone solve them.
However by involving everyone, including the layman in these fascinating problems will help increase appreciation for the beauty of mathematics amongst the general public and that to me is equal in worth to actually solving these problems.
Keep in mind that there already is a kind of wiki-like "collaboration" within the academic circles. The only difference being that the circle is relatively small compared to a "wiki".
But then, more people working on it doesn't necessarily improve things. For one, you will expect a very bad noise to signal ratio, where there would be a bunch of smart ass ideas that have already been disproved decades ago, or ideas which are so obviously wrong that no academic would even think of writing a paper for.
Basically the whole thing is based on the assumption that "monkeys banging on typewriters will eventually produce all the works of shakespear". It works in theory, but remember that it takes either an infinite number of monkeys, or infinite time -- whereas you could find a group of talented people to do the same job more effectively.
Expect a dozen claims of "TSP solved in P time!" from this site within a month, and nothing more afterwards.
Don't quote me on this.
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?
Proofs are not really found by committee. This Wiki might be a good way to share research and in that sense it may aid the effort but above and beyond that it's not going to contribute much.
It will take a unique insight and a particularly sharp mind to get to the bottom of these problems.
Simon
Does Concordat's jury theorem apply to highly specialized fields with rigorous rules like advanced mathematics?
I would think, and this is just a guess, that the qualified pool of people working on those problems is already nearly maxed out. Adding a bunch of folks that don't even 'speak the language,' as another poster mentioned, probably won't increase the odds of a solution very well.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
I think this is a great approach. Its effectiveness is questionable, but that is the story with everything else. Seems as though it should at least help shed some light on different approaches to some of the problems and maybe help those that are truly the 'professionals' that have been cranking on these problems to see some insight and fresh ideas. Kinda just rolls with the oss philosophy of having as many eyes and brains as possible looking at code to find the bugs and to provide creativity...so why not math. Maybe this will also open up more opportunity for those with gifts in programming to find methods to help design new methods for computational approaches to these problems. Will it cure cancer, stop hunger, prevent aids/hiv...no. But basic research is basic research, so why not.
my site of misleading and incorrect information!
The important difference there was that this project was only open to those actually actively involved in working on this problem. A public wiki will likely be bogged down by people who don't truly understand the problem or the approaches used to solve them - instead of everyone being able to contribute a little (as is possible in Wikipedia, which effectively just requires a transcription of information) the vast majority of people won't have anything to offer at all. And of course, those that are actively involved in working on these projects and want to share their work are in all likihood already doing so - with other people in the same field.
This project will likely attract those who do not have the particlar interest, time or background to work in a focused fashion on the problem, and consequently I'd be surprised if anything really unique or surprising came out of the project.
I'm a professional mathematician and I find the idea interesting.
Real researchers are familiar with cranks on newsgroups (James S Harris on sci.math for example) who year in year out claim to have proved this or that famous conjecture. Or, these people send proofs to real researchers, expecting attention when page one of their "proof" contains an error. So my hopes are not high that a community of semi-qualified people could solve the problems, but....
Suppose that this community set about collating and putting in context all of the material related to those problems that exists in the **research level** literature and **expounding** it in an extremely clear way. And suppose that real researchers were interested and joined the effort. This resource could be a HUGE contribution to the effort.
Unfortunately, the only joint efforts in mathematics on the web so far, do not deal seriously with the literature, but approach mathematics at a level of understanding of a first year graduate student. Problems that are well understood by the most brilliant minds on the planet are not going to be solved by people with an understanding as limited as that. It isn't as though some tough problems haven't been solved with elementary methods (the Kayal-Agrawal-Saxena result being a case in point), nor is it true that cranks do not occasionally come up with the goods (de Branges proof of the Bieberbach conjecture being a case in point), but the fact is, these are exceptions to the rule and the vast majority of difficult problems had immensely difficult solutions which took new developments in mathematics over periods of many years before they could be solved. Will a community of non-researchers make developments in modern mathematics? Personally I doubt it.
But, this is a new idea, hasn't been tried, so who knows where it will lead. As a research mathematician, the idea intrests me, and I would be involved if it headed in the right direction and didn't become a place for cranks to meet and fiddle with polynomials over an unspecified ring.
Good News! I've just solved P=NP. It's true if N = 1, and trivially true if P=0. Please donate my $1 million dollars to KDE and tell them to fix the PDF rendering. Maybe my computer science breakthrough will help?
Personally, I don't think the wiki will do any good. Good collaboration requires face-to-face contact. Anything else is really equivalent to the modern email/conference/preprint system in math. After all, who wants to share their million-dollar insight on a wiki only to get scooped? Double-plus-ungood: how do you decide which researcher did the critical part of the problem? It's tough to say now (and mostly irrelevant, but intellectual pissing matches have been with math since at leave Liebnitz vs. Newton), and it would be harder to decide in the mixed-up collaborative world of the wiki.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
While there are critics, 'wiki style' collaboration is a good thing. It often takes seeing a problem from different perspectives to understand the real nature of the problem. Sure, there will be idiots trying to help out or make their mark on the wiki, but the concept of shared thinking is more powerful than anyone knows. The promise that was HTML added to many people thinking of how to understand something is incredibly faster than the process that eventually created the atomic bomb.
So, jokes and criticism aside, the OST (open source thinking) is a good plan. Execution may have some drawbacks, but it has goodness in it.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
A lot of people on Slashdot are degree-obsessed; at an early age they have bought into the idea that everybody who does not have a formal academic education to at least PhD level is necessarily unable to contribute anything to research. (This is not just the chip on my shoulder talking, but as someone with a degree from Fen Poly who has recruited a fair number of graduates over the years, I know it takes far more than a degree or two to make a scientist, mathematician or even a developer. Curiosity, persistence, the ability to see connections are all important.) Although this Wiki may well fail, it might just bring to light a few more Ramanujans. The world does not consist solely of North Americans, and there are doubtless plenty of educated people in other cultures who do not have access to the networks that bring some people to the fore while others, equally well endowed, may never get an opportunity.
Pining for the fjords
Speaking as someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics ...
...
These problems are all incredibly difficult. A lot of very good mathematicians have thought about them, in some cases for over a hundred years. In some cases, even understanding the problem requires an advanced mathematical education. If there was anything approaching an easy solution, it would have been found already. That said
Problems like these always require some insight. Typically, either a way to relate the problem to some other unexpected area, or some new kind of machinery that creates a leverage against the problem.
Personally, I wouldn't expect that from such an effort.
This analogy is quite flawed. Whereas discussion of theoretical problems can lead to the solution itself, discussion of practical issues can only be a small part of their solution, and is followed by the actual solving, which is a seperate act.
Add in the fact that he's implying that the wiki is being touted as the solution, and the total incomparability of development goals vs mathematics problems ("solve"?), and it starts to become clear that the only reason this isn't already at -1 is that it contains the word "millenium" maintaining a veneer of relevance.
And your entire post underlines one for me. Believe it or not, the academic world is full of plenty of people just like your friend. Just as plenty of complex mathematical problems are solved (and published) by those in the business world. This isn't a business vs academia thing, this is just an example of an arrogant hack.
"Imagine the state of our theoretical knowledge in mathematics and computer science if, even in Academia, every discovery of a new algorithm or idea resulted in a patent application, and was jealously guarded as a secret which could produce profit."
No, thats not how patents work. Patents don't get jealously guarded as secrets, they are published. The whole point of patents is to encourage people to publish things instead of keeping them as trade secrets. Besides, most developments that could be considered theoretical would get published anyways, even by the 'evil' profit hungry corporations. Patents are generally used for more practical developments, simply because companies wouldn't really benefit at all from patenting a purely theoretical development.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.