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?

Comments

How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

[kunakida]

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.

Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

[constantnormal]

"If you can't communicate why something is a problem, then you have two problems."

If we knew enough about the problems to do all the categorizations you suggest, then we would be pretty well on the way to solving them. But you're right about the so-called "database" of problems maintained by the UIA. They seem to be missing a description of the problem in many cases. I guess they confuse a name with a description.

The Wikipedia list of unsolved problems is categorized by the discipline of science that they are (apparently) most pertinent to. In some cases, the same problem is listed multiple times. I find it to be a nice set of problems, but curiously brief. If these are all of the big unsolved problems, then we have a distinct lack of imagination.

As to how one would go about ranking them as to difficulty, if you can do that even with problems that we know the answers to, you're a better man than I. In fact, I think that the question of how to rank problems by the difficulty they present is yet another unsolved problem. It very likely encompasses the framework of logic used to describe and solve the problem, with some problems that are quite simple in a sufficiently complex world-view being conundrums in a simpler world view.

Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

[syousef]

Actually he obtained his doctorate the same year he published his Annus Mirabilis papers
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein#Works_and_do ctorate

He certainly didn't wait until he had this formal education to think about relativity. He'd done most of the ground work years before. The setting was a much less formal one in which he started out with learning difficulties once fascinated by the mathematics largely taught himself and worked hard until he was outdoing his tutors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein
"From 1894, following the failure of Hermann Einstein's electrochemical business, the Einsteins moved to Milan and proceeded to Pavia after a few months. Einstein's first scientific work, called "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields", was written contemporaneously for one of his uncles. Albert remained in Munich to finish his schooling, but only completed one term before leaving the gymnasium in the spring of 1895 to join his family in Pavia. He quit a year and a half before the final examinations, convincing the school to let him go with a medical note from a friendly doctor, but this meant that he had no secondary-school certificate.[4] That same year, at age 16, he performed a famous thought experiment by trying to visualize what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. He realized that, according to Maxwell's equations, light waves would obey the principle of relativity: the speed of the light would always be constant, no matter what the velocity of the observer. This conclusion would later become one of the two postulates of special relativity"

There are plenty of biographies on Einstein that go into more detail. I've read a couple.

object to definition of "Open Problem"

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Try this at home

[shma]

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.

Re:One of the problems taken from wikipedia in eco

[UbuntuDupe]

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.

I've been working on something similar, feedback?

[chrisgagne]

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?

Re:One of the problems taken from wikipedia in eco

[UbuntuDupe]

"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.

Re:The ultimate problems?

[Whiteox]

OK. The 'Sock Conundrum'
I've given up on this and now, regularly buy socks weekly. I know the cost can be prohibitive, but if you wear them only once, you can get 5 pairs for under $5 if you look around.
There's no need to worry about quality, 'cause you only wear them once. There is no frustration because you know exactly where your socks are at all times - either in a shopping bag with sales tags on them, or in the bin.
There are other advantages that are too numerous to list here.
The way I manage to budget for them is to eat one burger less per week. The trick is however is to find a reliable sock merchant.

Gilligan's Island was thoroughly understood by the Thermians - "Thermians, a peaceful and naïve cephalopod-like alien race who, having received twenty-year old transmissions of.... (Gilligan's Island) from Earth, and having no concept of fiction, have interpreted the show as "historical documents". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Quest

So if you re-view Gilligan's Island as a 'History' then the apparent incongruencies are explained away by historical bias.

"Why do good things happen to people who aren't me?" Next Week's Lotto Sweepstake's Result: xx xx x xx xx xx (xx) (xx)

42? 6 x 7!

The Gettier problem

[mdsolar]

The Getties problem came up as an unsolved problem in epistemology, the theory of knowledge. It looks like a problem in unknown knowns to get my former boss backwards. It is listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_ philosophy.

[T]wo men, Smith and Jones, who are awaiting the results of their applications for the same job. Each man has ten coins in his pocket. Smith has excellent reasons to believe that Jones will get the job and, furthermore, knows that Jones has ten coins in his pocket (he recently counted them). From this Smith infers, "the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket." However, Smith is unaware that he has ten coins in his own pocket. Furthermore, Smith, not Jones, is going to get the job. While Smith has strong evidence to believe that Jones will get the job, he is wrong. Smith has a justified true belief that a man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job; however, according to Gettier, Smith does not know that a man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job, because Smith's belief is "...true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith's pocket, and bases his belief...on a count of the coins in Jones's pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job."

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-users -selling-solar.html

Re:The Gettier problem

[Whiteox]

Everything I've read in response to your initial post clarifies the problem of objectivity. To simplify- Just because Smith believes something to be true, even by 'real evidence' (Jones's 10 coins), can mean that:

1. It really is false - Jones WILL be employed
2. It is true - Smith will be employed
3. It doesn't matter who gets employed as both have met the same condition for employment.

That is a sub-set, independently existing without regard to the real knowledge of the criteria or the objective truth. To say that Smith has objective truth is thus wrong, even though he (and we as witness) knows it is 'justified knowledge'.

Don't read too much into Gettier, as it was only a tool to try and circumvent 'faith'.

This restates the problem in a simpler form:

Whiteox: "I know there is a God. I have proof! I have justifiable knowledge that God exists"
MDSolar; "That's nice. I'm happy for you."

So when God opens up the heavens and makes them both realise that God exists (without faith) - then objective truth be known.

Re:I read it on the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Years, not months. The size of the deficit is um........... Staggering. The amazing part is how much money can be spent on getting nothing at all done.

Re:Does software count?

[Tablizer]

Constraints could be added as needed, including "type" constraints. It would be flexible that way. Plus, the static model is hard to write "meta" features with. And it could be useful for quick prototyping.

One example is a relational GUI system. Different widgets have different attributes. Either you make an entity for each widget, or you make the attributes dynamic. Existing RDBMS don't handle this problem very well, and that is perhaps why we have crap like DOM. If relational tools were more flexible, then DOM wouldn't exist.

What is Music?

[Philip Dorrell]

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?