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Want to Take On An Open/Unsolved Problem?
CexpTretical writes "The accumulation and focusing of knowledge may be the noblest use or purpose of the internet. There are plenty of open or unsolved problems left for this generation. Why not spend some of your time in the dark of this winter working on one of the big problems facing humanity? Open problems exists in almost every field of study. Wikipedia maintains a small list of them and at least one international group called the Union of International Associations maintains a database of open problems." Which problem do you want to see cracked first? Are you already working on one of these big issues?
What is the proper size and scope of government? Where can government intervention improve on the market? Does a market failure necessarily mean that government intervention is warranted? Can intervention make things worse? If the government intervenes in a market, how should it intervene? To what extent is public ownership of assets and businesses warranted?
Yeah, good luck using the internet discussions to solve THAT problem.....
Monstar L
I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition however this comment is too narrow to contain.
liqbase
What questions I'd like to see answered? Where do socks go in the laundry? Why do people obsess about the incongruities in gilligan's island? Why do good things happen to people who aren't me? 42. (now find me the question)
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
The accumulation and focusing of knowledge may be the noblest use or purpose of the internet.
That's your opinion. Midget porn afficionados would beg to differ.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
"Which problem do you want to see cracked first? "
How to get a date?
how to list the world's problems.
Seriously. The database sucked.
If I wanted to find a problem to tackle, just finding a good one is problem enough.
How about getting the problems
-listed by multiple tags
-filterable by area of interest, and skillset required
-prioritized by relevance to science, to humanity, to marketability
-sorted by difficulty, number of extant participants
If you can't communicate why something is a problem, then you have two problems.
"What is the proper size and scope of government?" Yeah, good luck using the internet discussions to solve THAT problem.....
It does seem to be an out-of-control problem. According to wikipedia, the size and scope of the government has tripled in the last six months.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Solve time travel so I can be the first poster. Anyone have a DeLorean? Plutonium, or maybe pinball machine parts to get some plutonium with?
If Bush wants to kill the terrorists, he should jump off a cliff.
Well, if someone can do something about the guy in the cubicle next to me...
Adler likes to hum as he works, not too loudly, just enough to break thru the usual office background noise. That would be distracting enough, however, Adler insists on choosing his nasal-tunes by whatever the last audible ring tone was that blared thru our locality. The ring tone/tune sticks in his head, and he hums it over and over, out load, until the next tune gets stuck in his borderline consciousness...I mean tone...I mean...urrgggg. And when Adler isn't humming, he's speed/redialing busy phone numbers via his on-hook speaker phone.
So, if someone can help Adler to find something else to do with his excess work energy, I'd be happy to focus on whatever 'world' problems are deemed most pressing.
from link in story: "... for which a solution is known to exist but which has not yet been solved". For many open problems, a solution is not known to exist. Indeed, many open problems turn out to have no solution. An example is if no solution can be derived from the axiomatic system in question, since the answer is "independent" of all the axioms, or other times the solution can be the proof that no solution can exist, e.g. for the halting problem. It was an open problem, you were looking for an algorithm, and bam, some wise guy proves that you can't find it. In that case, certainly, a solution was not "known to exist".
Here's one from mathematics that caught my eye. The goal is to find out whether 78,557 is the lowest Sierpinski* number. All but 8 candidates have been eliminated and there's a project called 17 or bust which is working on the last eight. As their name suggests, the project has personally eliminated 9 numbers already.
* Some of you may recognize Sierpinski from the carpet which bears his name.
I came here for a good argument
For example how would you go in P=NP?
Where does one start after understanding the problem?
I would just like to mention that with your contribution, Fermat has just become the most parodied mathematician in the history of the world.
Congratulations. Here's to another 400 years!
Disclaimer: This is a bit of self promotion.
e ) .
Surprised to see this article so I thought I'll talk a bit about a website
I newly created (http://www.opinomics.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag
Not much content at this stage but it's a website to gather feedback about companies, organised by cities. The rationale is that if we can focus the feedback into one convenient place, we can help to address information asymmetry that exists between companies and customers.
Which problem do you want to see cracked first?
The factors for x^2 + 5x + 6 please, showing work.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Very funny, but I actually consider that the most important question of all, because if you know the answer to that, you can generate the wealth necessary to trivially solve all of the others. Look at all the nations of the world and observe what a huge difference the choice of government makes!
It's also the hardest because it's extremely difficult to perform a scientific experiment to test it. There are millions of variables to control, and uncontrollable, and you can't grab X governments at random and make them do something, dividing them neatly into control and test groups. (That's why it's hard for people to come to agreement about the matter.)
Could MMORPG's and realistic computer models of human economic behavior change this? Maybe.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Sounds like an attempt at distributed computing... without the computing part.
Log into web site, check out work unit, complete unit, check in results, rinse and repeat.
There is an assumption in this sort of thing that there is a large enough untapped pool of relevant expertise to make this sort of job distribution effective. Is this actually just a study on whether or not that assumption is correct, or has someone really made that assumption and is expecting success?
I have troubles believing that this is really an effective means for tackling some of the listed problems.
i've often thought about this one myself! i think it's a really interesting concept?! Perception of color See also: Grue (color) The question hinges on whether color is a product of the mind or an inherent property of objects. While most philosophers will agree that color assignment corresponds to light frequency, it is not at all clear whether the particular psychological phenomena of color are imposed on these visual signals by the mind, or whether such qualia are somehow naturally associated with their noumena. Another way to look at this question is to assume two people ("Fred" and "George" for the sake of convenience) see colors differently. That is, when Fred sees the sky, his mind interprets this light signal as blue. He calls the sky, "blue." However, when George sees the sky, his mind assigns green to that light frequency. If Fred were able to step into George's mind, he would be amazed that George saw green skies. However, George has learned to associate the word, "blue" with what his mind sees as green, and so he calls the sky, "blue," because for him the color green has the name, "blue." The question is whether blue must be blue for all people, or whether the perception of that particular color is assigned by the mind.
No larger than necessary
In places where unrestricted market forces are detrimental
No
Yes
In a way that maximizes overall social wellbeing
To the extent that it ceases to be harmful to the overall health of society
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I was going to do that this weekend, but, with one thing and another... Tell you what, remind me Friday.
Easily, the largest problem which the world faces is the modern mental illness of feeling like you have to impose your chosen religion onto other people.
Solve religious fascism, of all flavors (Moslem fascists, Christian fascists, Jewish fascists, Sikh fascists, Hindu fascists - the list goes sadly on and on...) and we will all have enough time for all of those other problems to eventually be worked out.
Or, humans can keep stupidly embracing the virulent pathology of religious hegemony, coupled as it is with the perverse and bizarre orgiastic pleasure these religious pathologists seem to take in massive worldwide death and destruction (like the equally stupid Christian and Moslem ideas of Armageddon followed by a rapture or heavenly virgins), and we'll have no time for all of those other problems.
If we continue following religious idiots into the world suicide seemingly desired so pornographically by the world's religious nuts, none of any of those other problems will matter.
I can't believe that got modded "Informative" when the exact opposite is true. People, "Informative" does not mean "echoing my own beliefs".
Let's just look at the first empty thing said:
No larger than necessary
That's a pointless truism. In this context, proper=necessary. So, you have essentially said that the proper size is the proper size, giving zero information. Even a fascist believes that the state shouldn't be larger than necessary — they just believe that a totalitarian police state is necessary for order.
Perhaps if someone asks you what size USB connector is the proper one to go in a certain digital camera you will answer "One no larger or smaller than necessary". What a way to avoid answering a question whilst convincing airheads that you have done so!
The summary invites me to say which problem I would like solved. It would make things easier for a lot of people if we could write to NTFS without running Windows.
What is the proper size and scope of government?
That's easy. It's the government that maximizes the probability of human survival.
If there is more than one maxima, it is the one that maximizes human achievement.
If there are still multiple solutions, it is the one that maximizes human happiness.
Finally, pick the smallest government that will accomplish this.
Now you only have to solve for survival, achievement, and happiness.
because, I would like to see a dynamic relational database built.
Table-ized A.I.
The Internet is already used by scientists and others to post ideas about how to solve important problems. Just look at slashdot.
Seriously, there is a lot of interesting stuff out there if you are willing to sift through the trash.
The arxiv.org site is another example of a non-institutional forum in which people (scientists, mostly) post their ideas without the constraints of peer review. It actually works pretty well.
Last but not least, yes, I have almost finished solving an important problem, but I am not planning to publish the solution. Maybe give a hint or two. See if anybody gives a damn.
Bullshit. The one that maximizes freedom. Fuck survival.
What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? Could it carry a coconut?
How about an African swallow?
I believe the most important, before figuring out the rest about the size of government is: "How do I mimimize my income tax and maximize my return?". If we can figure out the answer to that question, only then can we asnwer all other questions about government.
How about adding a search interface. There are particular topics I've spent years working on and found one of them listed as an open topic 10 years ago. Is it still open?... I cannot tell.
Take a look at open-source software. It's collaborative, usually high-quality, and responsive to people's wants and needs. Apache and Linux, for instance, are two prime examples of how people coming together can do quite a bit in the world, even if in a limited way. Other fields of pursuit have an opportunity to capitalize the lessons learned in the software industry. Applying some of these lessons to the nonprofit sector could result in a greater net impact for society. It is possible to apply ingenuity to hundreds of real-world problems if we have a collaborative organizational structure. We've seen a couple of examples. For instance, look at http://openprosthetics.org/. This group has applied the open-source model to design better prosthetics, and a few of their prototypes are better than anything currently available on the market. I've been working on researching this topic for the last three years. Here's my story: In December of '03, I read an article in the New York Times about the World Bank Development Marketplace. A group of farmers in Zimbabwe struggled with a herd of elephants trampling their crops. With a $108,000 grant from the bank, they discovered that planting chili peppers around their crops deterred the elephants and provided a valuable cash crop. I asked a friend, Sandy, what she would do to prevent elephants from eating her crops. Pulling from her childhood experience, she suggested without coaching that the farmers plant marigolds around their crops. After all, marigolds kept the deer out of her vegetable patch! Perhaps marigolds would not deter an elephant. Suppose, then, that Sandy were a member of an online group hosted by Usenet newsgroups, Yahoo! Groups, or Google Groups, seeking a solution to the elephant problem. I am certain that she would have made a similar suggestion, and that the group probably would have recognized both its strengths and weaknesses. There is no guarantee, however, that this group would include the botanist, zoologist, or ecologist necessary to explore this seed of an idea. Let's then consider another recent innovation, the social network. One such network, Friendster, has a good search engine that permits finding people based on their interests. 210 people in my "network" have botany as an interest. 252 people enjoy elephants. 17 like Zimbabwe. Over 1,000 are interested in sustainable development. Might any of them be willing to spend five minutes to answer, "Are there any plants elephants don't like?" Over the last three years, I've developed a site called Cerbumi.org ("to brainstorm" in Esperanto) that combine these two tools. A carefully-designed mailing list system allows for rapid real-time discussion and brainstorming, while a flexible membership database allows project facilitators and other members to find expert advice. Built-in reputation-scoring and availability tools allow members to dictate clearly how willing they are to respond to certain kinds of inquires, and to whom. An executive summary is located at http://about.cerbumi.org/executiveSummary, and a Flash-based demonstration is located at http://cerbumi.org/flash/. What are your thoughts? Do you think this is a useful tool? Would you be willing to spend a few minutes of your time working on various projects?
"42. (now find me the question)" this has already been answered in Douglas Adams' book I believe (Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy)
...the SIGnificance of inSIGnificance is SIGnificant...
Money didn't prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
A lot of the time it takes more than money; it takes insight, ingenuity, and devotion. Money helps because then more people are trying to solve the problem, but it doesn't make it trivial.
Bullshit. The one that maximizes freedom. Fuck survival.
The freedom to do anything you want is called "anarchy," and I'm not sure it can be considered "government."
finally somebody realizes the value of survival over happiness. mod parent up a lot please.
licks to the center of a tootsie roll pop?
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
On the list of unsolved problems, there's N = NP . I'm browsing at +3 here, so I don't know if someone already made the joke and it has been modded down to oblivion because it has been told so many times before, but I'll always remember when the teacher asked in class "Is P = NP" and some guy who probably read the joke online said "Yes, P = NP if N = 1".
This has to be one of the dumbest submissions to slashdot that I've seen in a while. Looking over the CS section of the problems (the only category I'm really qualified to review), I see 2 problems related to P=NP. Yes, this is a problem I'm going to solve in my spare time this winter. If the other fields problems look anything remotely like this one, good luck.
In all honesty, I don't think you're going to see real problems listed on a site like this. the problems are just in such niche areas, and more importantly in many field people don't want to share what the problems are. This is because coming up with what the problem is is half of the work. In computer engineering for instance you might have an idea that looks to speedup application XYZ (or a general class of applications), and then you come up with what problems need to be solved to implement your solution. Then of course you actually solve them. If coming up with the problem was easy than so many PhD students wouldn't have such a difficult time coming up with a thesis topic. When students do have an idea in mind, and potential solutions, they tend not to share them until they are ready to publish. Otherwise others may beat them to it.
Finding a good way to come up with what problems need to be solved is a very good problem on it's own. It takes immense knowledge in most fields just to have a good concept of the ideas that are being looked at, and having some idea of the solutions that have been proposed, and what is a reasonable next step. If such problems were easy to solve, we'd like have a lot more PhDs out there.
Phil
"What caused the great depression?"
...media companies. Go do some research and see who actually is the ultimate controller of the MSM in its various forms. We had another president who tried to warn his people about it. see:Ike, retirement speech
That's an easy one. It was a planned controlled crash due to the ability of the private central bankers (who had just relatively recently wrested control of the currency from the actual people) and the big brokerage houses to manipulate the currency supply and the issuance and trading of stocks. It was designed as a heist, a big one, a wealth transference gambit, hidden under color of law and "whoops, an unfortunate accident!". It was an amazing success. They keep doing it, too, just now they have gotten more sophisticated and do it on smaller but longer time scales. they realise huge crashes/heists could lead to "social instability" where their own exalted personages would be in physical peril, so they don't go that far anymore, just close enough.
On a small scale, here is an example that is easy to see, you cannot just "save money" and have it retain value. They artificially inflate the money supply well past what true productivity would indicate as a balanced and accurate growth rate. This is called inflation. So, to "beat inflation", and not have your money "drop in worth", they highly recommend to you that you invest in "stocks", which they also control. And the stocks of today bear little resemblance to the true original meaning, in design or practice. They maintain the name for the most part, and that's it. These create the problem, then offer you *their* solution to the problem, which still goes to benefit them, not you. Also see:Dialectic.
It's a long running con, people get sucked into it all the time, because without careful thought and planning, you will "lose" no matter how hard you work or try to save. You may not find out you have lost until years later, but believest thou, it is designed to make you lose, and to keep you satisfied up to that point with poker chip monopoly numbers.
You see, they really like the notions of aristocracy, with them as the aristocrats. This is no longer quite as popular as it used to be, because the peons don't like that notion or word, so they had to come up with a dodge where they can hide behind other titles and practices, to keep their serfs faked out, but for all practical purposes,they can still live the same way-as aristocrats-as they always did. And this goes on for generations.
Our own US founding fathers warned us about both notions. They warned against private central banks controlling the currency, in detail I might add, with all the legitimate reasons (two presidents were..ousted in a rather severe manner when trying to break that up,as the problem kept being reintroduced, Lincoln and JFK to be specific), and they also set up the public charter system for corporations originally to first be of the public interest, and any profits for the corporations were secondary, and had to always default to being of the public interest when in doubt.
Notice both those things are no longer true, and now we have a lot of problems.
And before the brainwashed economists troll their way in with their indignant stutterings, answer one question-how many shares of stock do you hold in any of the 12 private federal reserve banks? Oh ya, that's right, you don't, and can't, it's a closed system. Well, who owns it then? Answer, other banks, domestic and foreign, who are allowed to "loan" money, and then charge interest to you, in persona and through your alleged government, from a supply that doesn't exist, has never been audited, and has no official oversight. They can create this supply at will, a huge amount. That's where the "fractional" in fractional reserve banking comes from. And what else do these banks do? Well, they "invest", like in
Sweet deal for them right? A perpetual modern aristocracy, except in name. The
"Trivial" might have been an exaggeration, but the point remains: if economic resources are nearly superabundant, you can devote a lot more people to tasks like proving mathematical theorems, and more importantly, you will have better mathematical training. It's true that you don't really need lots of economic resources* to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, as anyone can in theory, arrive at the answer. It just helps immensely.
*I don't want to say "money", because what's important is what the money lays a claim to. You seem to be equating money with wealth, which is emphatically not the case. Wealth is what people value; money is an intermediate good in the exchange of wealth. You can easily create more money, but you can not easily create the value of the things it lays claim to. Having the right political/economic system is what I believe would have the largest long term wealth on the ability to provide wealth -- the things people value.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
could also be worded as "Association of International Associations". Hm. The department of redundancy department anyone?
I understand your point, and for conventional research, funding is very important. But in the case of FLT (and nonapplied mathematics or any field where the practical applications are not immediately obvious), money (or wealth) is a not large factor at all. Large monetary prizes have been offered for FLT but they came up with nothing for centuries. Perelman was not motivated by the monetary award from CMI. And in my opinion, if all the world's resources were devoted to proving the Collatz conjecture, we still wouldn't have a proof within the next decade (and that's a conservative estimate).
It's not that larger incentives can be awarded (I never said anything like that at all); it's that people can be freed up from other tasks entirely; i.e., fewer farmers, etc. are necessary to support the world, and can now be devoted toward the things on the list, so you now have more eyeballs looking at any one problem. And it wasn't just pure math problems that are on the list either.
It seems like all you have to offer is your opinion that, "aha!!!! I found something whose discovery time can't be shortened at all!" Hey -- good for you.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
... to be solved....
How to make reliable electronic voting machines.
A non-mathematician has no shot at proving FLT or Poincare or the Riemann hypothesis. It seems like all you have to offer is your opinion that, "aha!!!! I found something whose discovery time can't be shortened at all!" Hey -- good for you.
I provided an example to demonstrate a point. There are many problems which money (or wealth) have very limited effect in solving (and at the same time many where the effect is significant).
is justified true belief knowledge? (an "unanswered philosophy question", lol) Psycho-babble
Kharma is like a boomerang. Mine is broken.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This seems to have something to do with the answer I sometimes give my son when he ask how to spell a word and I answer "With letters."
The problem looks to me to be one of degenerate labeling when passing by reference. Basically, if Smith wants to believe something about people with coins in their pockets he is getting the answer to the question: some people have applied for a job, will one of them get it? If you redirect by the number of coins in a pocket, but you have not checked that this is a unique label, then the question ends up meaning something other than you think it means. The statement about the man with ten coins getting the job is true for the same reason that "A or not A" is true. Regardless of coins, there is no knowledge about the answer to the apparent question (who will be offered the job) until the decision has been made, and since neither Smith nor Jones make that decision, thay can't know its outcome till they are told.
If anyone has worked on this I'd like to hear if this solution has already been discounted.
--
Power your bright ideas with solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"How many licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?"
Obviously, the erroneously-reported answer of 'three' is in the public consciousness, but that was hardly determined by the scientific method.
Anyone here got experience in filling out government research grants? I'm willing to put in the time necessary to do the research, as long as I can get the funding.
Question: "Why did the universe have such low entropy in the past, resulting in the distinction between past and future and the second law of thermodynamics?"
Answer: It didn't. Entropy is Boltzmann's constant times the log of the number of microstates consistent with the given macrostate. The macrostate "the universe" can only be in one microstate at any time, the microstate the universe is actually in. Any other microstate would be a hypothetical alternate universe, not "the universe." Thus the entropy of the universe is and will always be zero.
The same goes for any actual object. Entropy is a property of *states*, not objects, and is purely a matter of how those states are defined.
Paragraphs, man, paragraphs!
There's an organization called dropping knowledge, located in Berlin and San Francisco, which worked together with the Union of International Associations on creating and then using an ontology of themes into which the problems from the catalog of the UIA are organized, for enabling a global dialog on these issues on droppingknowledge.org.
To kick of the discussion they built the world's biggest table and invited 112 people to Berlin on September 9th, 2006. All participants answered 100 questions collected on the website and were filmed during the event. Their 11200 answers are also part of the discussion including the video recorded at the event as well as transcriptions of all the answers.
The problem is that rewards != funding. Offering a million dollars to solve a Math problem doesn't mean that someone can quit their job and go work on the problem, because until they've solved it they don't have any money.
sorry, open problems have nothing to do with open source software. Mod parent 'off topic'.
assignment != equality != identity
Could MMORPG's and realistic computer models of human economic behavior change this? Maybe. Perhaps "Jennifer Government: NationStates"?
http://www.nationstates.net/
"Good news, everyone!"
... he tried to solve it through the postal system.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What happens inside our minds when we listen to music? Why does enjoying music or being able to enjoy music make us have more grandchildren? What is the formula for calculating musicality?
Music: a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality. Musicality: a perceived aspect of speech.
Employment
A non-mathematician has no shot at proving FLT or Poincare or the Riemann hypothesis.
I think the point is that with super-abundant resources, there would simply be more mathematicians. At present, intelligent people who would have a shot are going into fields like business, law, accountancy - fields where they can make money now. Maths can't compete with the salaries here, and unless you prove one of the dozen problems with a giant award waiting, you're not going to be a millionaire.
If resources were enough that this just didn't matter, I think you'd naturally get a lot more people involved in this sort of thinking profession with no guaranteed payoff at the end.
"Want to Take On An Open/Unsolved Problem?"
Sounds like every relationship I've ever been in. Sure, I'll give her a spin.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I've got problems of my own here..
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Nah, the real question is - "how to convince people that the concept of electronic voting is fundamentally retarded?".
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Take a look at open-source software. It's collaborative, usually high-quality,
Uh, some open source projects are. Most are not. In fact, the vast majority are not.
and responsive to people's wants and needs
Oh yeah, THAT explains why GIMP doesn't do the CMYK color model. That explains why most of the time copying and pasting of anything except text between applications (and sometimes within applications) doesn't work.
I'm not going to delve any further off-topic, but suffice it to say that you're making a few bad assumptions at the beginning of your mega-paragraph there.
Comment of the year
"if you know the answer to that, you can generate the wealth necessary to trivially solve all of the others."
Remind me again, how does having a lot of money prove P = NP?
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
It's strange to see this resurface after so many years.
I've been working on this problem on and off since college. I was introduced to this problem by an excellent professor named Dr. John Rabung. I've recently made what I think is interesting progress, but have not yet had it reviewed.
I'm also in the process of developing a BOINC-based solver, but that's going slowly.
If anyone else is working on this, I'd love to hear from you - please reply to this post!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
It is only a problem because you make it so. If you define knowledge as "justified true belief", then you arrive to this contradiction because you have not specified how a belief is supposed to be justified. If Smith "justifies" his belief that Jones will get the job by counting the number of coins in Jones's pocket, he is just making an unrelated assertion. "A man with ten coins gets the job" is only a valid argument if the employer states this as a condition for employment. Otherwise, Smith might as well believe that a man with dark hair will get the job, or a man with a 63mm pinky will get the job, or whatever. He can believe whatever he wants, but he will still not know a thing. Knowledge consists of concepts that are logically rooted in reality, and thus can serve as valid representations of reality in cognition, which is the primary purpose of knowledge.
To verify that a concept is rooted in reality, you must be able to logically deduce it from real premises. Sometimes this is not possible due to insufficient information, in which case your concept's reality becomes uncertain. This uncertainty depends on the amount of information you have and can be computed by using Bayesian inference rules. For example, if the employer in question explicitly states that only men with ten coins in their pockets will get the job and Smith has knowledge of his previous statements and knows that he keeps his word, then Smith can compute his degree of certainty that Jones will get the job from the employer's statement and Jones' coin count. Because the employer's choice is involved, no matter how honest he may be, it is unlikely that this certainty value will be 1. Also, Smith is predicting a future event, and his certainty value must necessarily be less than 1 because he does not have complete information about every event that might happen between his calculation and the employer's decision and how such events may influence the outcome.
Absolute certainty is only possible when all information is available, and we may approach this in precisely defined fields such as mathematics. In most other disciplines some degree of uncertainty about our statements is inevitable, but by acquiring information, this uncertainty value can be made insignificant. It must be emphasized that this uncertainty is in our minds and does not in any way relate to the state of the universe. Smith and Jones may both have different certainty values for Jones' chance of employment, but neither number has any direct effect on who will really be employed. Both men have knowledge of the choice, but this knowledge is uncertain due to lack of informaiton. Knowledge is derived from reality, not the other way around. Because of this it is not proper to ask whether each man's conjecture is true, since the event has not occured (=been made real) yet. The proper questions to ask are whether each man had correct information on which to base his decision and whether he used proper rules of inference in manipulating them.
There is an entire book on this subject, called "Probability Theory, The Logic of Science", which you are invited to read.
If you ask enough women on a date, eventually one of them will agree. The more you ask, the better your chances. Because you probably live in a populated area with millions of people, you ought to have a million women to bother. If it takes you ten minutes on average to find a woman and ask "Hey, wanna have dinner sometime?", then you can ask nearly a hundred women out every day. More if you work hard. If you are so unappealing that only one woman in a thousand will agree to go out with you, on average you'll have a date every five days.
Then you can move on to the next great problem: how do you keep a date?
I started a blog a while ago called http://problemstosolve.com/about/problems to solve, with the same purpose of cataloging solved problems, along with recording their associated methods and experiences on the internet. My goal has been to open this site up to a large user base that can tag and solve their problems collectively, and help each other solve theirs. Right now it's just a wordpress blog though; if anyone feels like contributing (I can give you a wordpress login) or helping the site get set up (work with me on a new PHP interface) and turn it into a community resource please contact me at jordan314 at yahoo dot com.
No problem is solved without at least a little thought, and these problems apparently have come in for considerable thought. Collecting them in this way brings attention to all of them and thus may increase the amount of thought being spent on them.
s -selling-solar.html
In some ways, this is no different than sending people to school where such things are discussed. And, passed unsolved problems, like the difficulty in finding a fractional form for pi, have been solved in this way.
So, I'd say this is the usual means for handling these kinds of problems and for coming up with new ones too.
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Solving energy dependence and global warming: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
The NFSNET project uses the Number Field Sieve to find the factors of increasingly large numbers. It's a small group and they need your help. I run their app on my dual G5 without trouble for years now.
I was on a pretty good track toward solving P=NP, but had to give it up to go earn a living for my family. Multiply me by a million people, and one of us would have gotten there by now.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I can solve the Mind-Body problem right now - the brain is the hardware, the mind is a virtual construct of the running software on that brain hardware (or wetware). In one sense they are separate in that one is virtual where the other is physical, however the mind is reliant on the brain much like a running kernel is dependant on CPU(s), RAM and other hardware - the brain can exist without the mind but the reverse is not true.
The question of 'what happens when you die?' can be answered the same as 'what happens to the game I'm playing if I turn off the computer or console without saving?'
Using this logic I can prove that a) your mind can live forever if you can find suitable hardware to run it on (however it must remain in a running state as it cannot be shut down or rebooted) and b) the people who get cryogenically frozen are wasting their money as to 'bring someone back to life' who is frozen would require saving the session state of every electron in the brain at time of death and being able to replace and re-start them as they were. If you could do that you probably wouldn't need to.
Retarded? Yes, though less retarded than our current system.
You are assuming P/NP is solvable.
If it's not solvable, it should at least be possible to prove that it isn't solvable. Or, more precisely, that it is independent of the standard axiomatic system. Proving a question is independent of your axioms still counts as an answer as far as mathematicians are concerned.
god, I hate this joke...
:-(
I hear it EVERY F***ING TIME when I tell people what I do on my free time...
letters don't always stand for numbers...
P is the set of decision problems that can be exactly solved by a turing machine with _P_olynomial time complexity
NP is the set of decision problems that can be exactly solved by a _N_on-deterministic turing machine with _P_olynomial time complexity...
"is P = NP or is P =/= NP?" is the most important question in hundreds of areas of research...
now I'll go and cry again because it upsets me not to know this answer
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Perhaps if two swallows carried the coconut. But they'd have to have it on a line.
You are assuming I am assuming.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
* Life
* How did it start?
non-scientific question, won't be able to verify with experiment
* Is life a cosmic phenomenon?
* Are the conditions necessary for the origin of life narrow or broad?
* Did life start on this planet or was there an extraterrestrial intervention (for example a meteor from another planet)?
non-scientific question, won't be able to verify with experiment
* Is immortality possible?
non-scientific question, won't be able to verify with experiment
* DNA / Genome
* What are all the functions of DNA?
This is just plain stupid unscientific.
* What is the evolutionary origin of every gene and every base pair?
non-scientific question, won't be able to verify with experiment
* What is the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)?
non-scientific question, won't be able to verify with experiment
* What is the complete structure and function of the proteins expressed by a cell or organ at a particular time and under specific conditions?
This is just plain stupid unscientific.
* What is the complete function of the regulator genes?
This is just plain stupid unscientific.
* Does Junk DNA function as molecular garbage?
Not a question
* The C-value enigma: what are the functions of noncoding DNA, and why do different organisms have very variable amounts of it?
Some functions already known. Second part does not even qualify for a paper.
* Consciousness / Self
* What is it?
Absolutely unscientific
* Why is it necessary for many animals (especially mammals) to dream?
Unscientific question
* What are the inheritable characteristics of intelligence?
Some of them are already known. No question.
* Bioelectromagnetism
* How do animals possess long-range navigation and migration abilities?
Answered in a different form. In this form unscientific.
* How was the homing ability developed?
Unscientific. Unable to verify with experiment
* How can some animals detect earthquake precursors?
That is very special question that deserves a paper but not the inclusion in the list.
* What are the effects of natural electric fields?
Stupid.
* Viruses / Immune system
* What are the signs of current or past infection to discover where Ebola hides between human outbreaks?
Interesting, but hardly deserve inclusion in the list.
* What is the origin of antibody diversity?
If it is as in "origin of life", then it is unscientific. If it is as in "mechanism" then the question is pretty much answered already.
* What is the relationship between the immune system and the brain?
Stupid. Too broad. Many aspects already known.
* Why doesn't a mother's immune system reject the different DNA of a fetus?
Answered already.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I once solved P=NP while doodling in my combinatorics class, but I didn't have enough space to give the solution in the margin.
I adblock all animated gifs.
Blessed be the prime numbered slashdotters
What would really need to be added? Please describe. This shouldn't be that hard to achieve.
Dynamic Tables:
insert into newTable values (1,2,3,4);
would create a table with 4 columns? Numbered columns?
Why not just prefix this with something like-
create table newTable (c1, c2, c3, c4);
Dynamic columns?
What's the goal here? Do you want to add columns dynamically as needed?
What else is necessary to have a 'dynamic' database? I really think the sqlite.org guys will work with you on this. We can always offer code to them or even fork.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
P=NP is easy to solve. When P=0 or N=1, then P=NP. Also if P<0 and N=i. Otherwise P<>NP.
Maybe I should get a job as a mathemagician:
"But 7 goes into 28 four times!"
"Err...this is a magic 7!"
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.